While China’s athletes won glory in Paris at this year’s Olympics and Paralympics, there was widespread agreement on Chinese social media that the country’s reporters did not. Bloggers and athletes alike rolled their eyes at the inanity of the Chinese press corps’ questions to competitors. One particular flashpoint was a comment by Nanfang Daily’s Zhu Xiaolong, who questioned 17-year-old diving gold-medalist Quan Hongchan’s educational level and emotional maturity during a livestream. But the storm over Zhu’s comments was a microcosm of broader discussion about the news media, their role in China today, and their capacity to fulfill it. 

This series of translations shows some examples. First, a post from WeChat public account Wang Zuo Zhong You slammed reporters for puffing themselves up with intellectual pretensions and chasing clicks with vapid fluff, rather than seriously focusing on the Games and athletes. The second installment, from “Human Swamp Excavator,” argued that Chinese authorities’ cultivation of tameness and docility in the media at home has left the country toothless against fiercer predators on the international scene. Despite its more nationalist tone and broadsides against foreign media, the post was removed from WeChat, though it remains online elsewhere.

In the third piece below, from WeChat public account Zhangjiang Celebrity, a former reporter looks at the Olympic debacle in the context of China’s current media environment and the financial and political pressures on it (some explanatory links have been added):

It feels like the whole internet is roasting Olympic reporters and the mediocre standard of their interview questions, like they’re all just there to buy soy sauce. What a lot of people don’t realize is that, in fact, these people can’t really be considered reporters at all: at best, they’re just propagandists. One of these propagandists asked Quan Hongchan, “People are always talking about how high you fly, how much you’ve achieved, but do you ever find it exhausting?” Is this kind of question strange? Not at all. It’s their job to ask lofty questions. And it’s not the answer that matters, but how they ask the question. They’ve got their marching orders.

[…] Real reporters in China are a rarer breed than pandas. We can’t send them off to clown around at the Olympics—we need them here at home, keeping an eye on the people’s hardships, following up on the tanker truck [tainted cooking oil] scandal, and digging into how the corpse-trafficking scheme could have happened. Anyway, these real reporters probably couldn’t afford a ticket to Paris. They’re mostly at commercial media outlets like the Beijing News or Southern Weekly, which actually have to watch their costs and balance them with revenues—unlike certain TV stations, news agencies, and newspaper conglomerates who can afford to kick back, thanks to their brand sponsorships or taxpayer funding, and who can send a hundred or a thousand reporters as easily as others might send one or two.

No need to send teams of reporters to cover the Israel-Palestine or Russia-Ukraine wars or the Japanese tsunami—but the Paris Olympics are a must. There’s no risk, the travel is taxpayer-funded, it’s great fodder for positive-energy propaganda, and any old question can hit the hot searches … what’s to lose? A friend who’s a journalist in the system told me privately that it’s quite possible that the people on the scene aren’t reporters at all, but rather department leaders. After all, who wouldn’t jump at the chance to go on such a pleasant junket? It makes a lot of sense, when you think about it—no wonder their questions exhibit such lofty vision and keen insight. No junior reporter could aspire to such a realm.

This is nothing new. Years back, when I was a reporter, some of us were already much better than others, as bad money drove out the good. When I went somewhere to gather news, local officials would watch me like a hawk as soon as they heard I was from Southern Weekly. But when they heard that another reporter was from some central state media outlet or another, they’d assign them a car and driver and a guide while they reported. Why? Because Southern Weekly meant supervision by public opinion—it meant that if the local issue being reported on wasn’t well-handled, these officials could lose their posts. But if someone was from central media, that meant they were one of their own, sent down by the upper ranks. Whatever local issue they were reporting on, they’d probably let you save face; if you messed it up, they’d probably just file an internal report or something, and there might still be some positive lines in it. So of course, you’d roll out the welcome mat for them.

Are there any good reporters in official media? Yes: past cohorts at [CCTV’s] Focus Report and Oriental Horizon, for example, and some at Xinhua—Zhou Yijun and Shui Junyi both started at Xinhua. But where have they all gone now? Some left the country; some left the industry. Almost none of my colleagues and peers from back in the day are still working in news. It’s not that everyone lost their ideals, or their interest in news work: it’s just that that spirit isn’t there anymore. Working in news is like competing in the Olympics—you need that spirit if you’re going to be able to give it your all. What that spirit is, I won’t go into—you can figure it out for yourself. [Chinese]

The incongruity between wrenching domestic stories and official celebrations of Olympic glory was also captured in a poem posted to the WeChat public account “Water Ghost,” “Watching the Olympics from the Floodwaters”:

1

Disaster never left them. Floodwaters surged in from all directions
Turning farmland into fishpond, and village pagodas
into scattered islands
Only the tall trees stayed standing
Those fleeing the waters waited for rescue boats, supplies,
And good news of newly captured Olympic gold. […] 

4

The orderly rows of corpses were like
Orderly rows of gold medals
Weeping blood, the crows cawed endlessly, and nested in the setting sun. [Chinese]