For the Newsweek blog, Jonathan Ansfield writes about the “free-talk” roundtable discussion he participated in with editors from Global Times about Olympics coverage:
More questions came up. Why were the foreign media “politicizing” the Games? In response it was pointed out that they were politicizing our “politicizing”, along with just about everything else. What could be done to improve the coverage? Lots of advice there: more original reporting, less cherry-picking; more full translations, fewer slanted excerpts; fewer one-sided polemics, more balanced array of commentary. The editors were open to most of those suggestions. But original reporting of foreign affairs (at the whim of the Party propaganda department and Foreign Ministry) would be hard, they suggested. What storylines would we be following? For one, the U.S.-China medal race. They liked that idea.
How did our feedback affect their Olympic coverage, if at all? No idea yet. It’s hard to tell. But our Chinese colleagues in the Newsweek bureau have been helping us keep up with Global Times. Here we’ve translated a smattering of excerpts printed in its pages over the past two weeks.
