From China Media Project:
Last month CMP wrote about an official bulletin from state media minders detailing four news extortion cases in China [article here]. On May 25, nine days after the official statement, China Industry and Commerce News, a newspaper not implicated in the above bulletin and published by the State Administration of Industry and Commerce, announced it would introduce new internal measures to avoid violations of conduct. While the phenomenon of news extortion (and other violations of journalistic ethics) are the product of endemic institutional problems, the supposition in the release is that they can be dealt with by ratcheting up propaganda training for news workers. It provides a taste of how Chinese leaders are in the habit of using hackneyed ideologies to deal with very new problems in the media brought on by rapid commercialization under an autocratic system:…[full text]
