In an interview last year with Columbia University’s “Global Media Wars” monitoring project, Laurie, CCTV’s American adviser, said that Chinese officials are debating whether to permit greater freedom for China’s international broadcasts than its domestic ones. “Gradually a ‘one country, two systems’ approach is taking shape” in which state-run media outside China can be more critical of the government than those reaching China’s 1.3 billion people, he said.
If so, the key word may be “gradual.” After reviewing CCTV’s programming, Columbia’s “Global Media Wars” report said that the network still largely toes the party line.
(FRANKO LEE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES) - A woman walks pass the China Central Television complex in Beijing.
“The government’s hand can be seen most clearly in what isn’t shown — in the omission of any content that might contradict or criticize the image the Communist Party promotes,” the report said. “There is plenty of criticism of the United States (and virtually none of China’s leaders). But [the network’s] hosts use a lighter touch than their counterparts at state-financed Press TV from Iran or Russia’s RT. They suggest, by way of implication rather than assertion, that the world’s only superpower is in decline and fearful of China’s ascendancy.”
A CCTV news story, for example, about China’s image in the West took on a defensive, almost wounded tone. After a Chinese college professor offered a sound bite about how Westerners have ginned up “the China-threat fallacy,” an announcer intoned, “The presumed threat is likely to grow this year as China now has the world’s second-biggest economy. Today, China’s critics view it as several threats to economics, military matters and energy. There are negative reports about the country in the English [-speaking] media every day.”
On a more mundane issue, CCTV apparently has a long way to go before its broadcasts are as smooth and polished as the global broadcasters it hopes to compete against.
The Columbia report said that CCTV’s broadcasts “look amateurish. . . . In one segment of the program News Update, loose wires trailing from an anchor’s microphone were visible on camera; in another, an anchor launched into the day’s top story only to be informed, on camera, that the lineup had changed. Often, the same ‘correspondent’ narrates back-to-back segments — even if the stories involved are happening on opposite sides of the globe. Occasionally, anchors and correspondents cite contradictory facts without offering explanations for the discrepancy.”
The report concluded that CCTV has “yet to produce a broadcast with global credibility and world-class technical standards.”
That’s one of several challenges a new crew in Washington is about to face.
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