From METANOIAC! a weblog from China:
I just got back from a symposium on press freedom in China that was part of Columbia University’s World Leaders Forum. Columbia President Lee Bollinger was the moderator, and lots of media elite from both China and the US were on the panel. Among them were Dorinda Elliott, who currently oversees Time magazine’s business and financial coverage and has a strong China background (heh); Li Xiguang, Executive Dean of the journalism school at Tsinghua University (he comes up in the China blogosphere now and then); and Anthony Yuen, a popular anchor for Phoenix TV in Hong Kong.
The evening got off to a rocky start when Bollinger introduced a hypothetical dilemma: if he were a newspaper editor in China, and one of his reporters had uncovered and documented a clear case of corruption within the central government, what would be his first step? Would he publish the story without hesitation? Would he go to some government office to get permission to publish? What method would he use to begin making the story public? He turned the question to Anthony Yuen.
Yuen said he’d use the “zig-zag method,” which brought a flurry of laughter from the audience. He didn’t really clarify this too much, but Li Xiguang took it a bit further. True to form, Mr. Li said that his first concern in publishing the story would be to ask how doing so would affect his own career (!!!). Keep in mind that this is coming from the Executive Dean of Tsinghua University’s Journalism School who was named one of China’s top ten educators in 2004. He backed off from this a little to snarkly indulge his American audience with a clarification: perhaps the story could make him famous. Li then went on to say that he would try to determine the power relationship involved between the newspaper publisher and the corrupt official(s) and then calculate the best way to proceed.
