In the interest of promoting international standards of media freedom and credibility, I made a helpful revision to your above assertion.

In fact, one could say that your original statement is more applicable to the Western Free Press (sic) than it is to the Chinese media, which are rank amateurs compared to the Anglo-American propaganda machine. After all, this Anglo media is dominant globally and is much more sophisticated in its deception.

One only has to look at the massive lies (or in AngloNewspeak, “faulty intelligence”) repeatedly produced by the Anglo-American media about issues like “Weapons of Mass Destruction.”

These lies of course were used by America, England, and Australia to launch their criminal war against Iraq, which has genocided over 600,000 Iraqi citizens. Perhaps, this crime against humanity inadvertently reveals what Western Liberal Democracy™ really stands for.

There is a reason why the BBC, for example, has deservedly earned the nickname British Bullsh*t Corporation among antiwar activists. Auntie Beeb isn’t as benign as England would like the world to believe.

Worse yet, the USA and its democratic allies have manipulated this WMD issue in general as a Machiavellian pretext to put geopolitical pressure on nations like Iran and North Korea.

Similar to the case of Iraq, the real Anglo-American agenda has very little to do with weapons proliferation or disarmament–as if nuclear powers like America and England have any moral standing on this issue in the first place. The Anglo-Americans’ agenda is overthrowing sovereign governments like Iraq, Iran, or North Korea using WMDs as a political cover.

The AngloNewspeak term for this aggressive USA-UK policy is “regime change,” a sanitized euphemism that George Orwell would appreciate. But it appears that Mr. O’Brien prefers to deny or spindoctor away the reality of this Anglo-American geopolitical agenda, as seen in his previous post about North Korea.

Indeed, for some strange reason, many freedom-loving citizens of the USA, England, and other vaunted “Western-style democracies” dutifully regurgitate their own nations’ fundamental lies, even as they piously attack the media of their geopolitical enemies.

Ultimately, if Xinhua wants to enhance its credibility, it should adopt the “standards” of the international (read: Western) media–as a negative example of what not to become.

http://www.williambowles.info/ini/index.html

I was linked to your blog from Charlie’s Positive Solutions. I greatly enjoy reading your accounts of life at Xinhua and can only add my praise to those who posted above me.

However, I must make a small correction. You state in this piece that China.org.cn is subject to larger constraints than Xinhua. I don’t know if you have any experience of China.org but in reality, we are far less constrained that either Xinhua or China Daily from what I know. I work as both a journalist and a polisher here and I have been consistently amazed at some of the stuff we get away with. Although we obviously toe the line in many respects, we have had ample opportunity to question or even go against the flow of CPC propaganda. I think this is due to our editor-in-chief’s firm conviction that our international readership would desert us should we be seen as too propagandistic.

Your point on the Three Gorges article is well-made though. We dropped the ball there.

I think it’s a little too early to say what “Harmonious Society” really means, since the internal party debate on this does not appear to have concluded. The party has only relatively recently decided to agree that the Three Represents means that the class war is over. Some may well say that a Harmonious Society means crushing dissent. Others would say it means revising or reversing policies that led to unbridled authoritarian capitalism stealing farmers’ land, exploiting migrant workers and abusing flaws in the legal system so that the powerful can become even more rich and the rich even more powerful.

The different interpretations can stand in opposition, or be combined.

Harmonious Society is the slogan of the day, so countless officials will bore us to death as they parrot the phrase on TV, while ignoring it in practice. But what it will end up meaning is up for grabs.

What the example was meant to illustrate was the effect of “official” confirmation on public action. People living under non-transparent systems of government often feel as though their interests will never be served. Authorities encourage this feeling, because their power relies on a complacent populace. When messages emerge from state-controlled media that confirm the public’s unspoken suspicions, it helps people realize that they’re not crazy. This is a relief in and of itself, and it opens the door to reform another inch or two.

The psychology of the Chinese political system involves a strong appeal to conformity. The media is often used as a smothering element, to dampen protest by exclusion. That’s what “Harmonious Society” is all about. The press needn’t cooperate, though.

A lot of people in the west of the country got very excited. But I fear they were being used by much bigger forces than they really understood. That election all seemed very easy to understand in the conveniently simplified black and white narrative of the European and American media. I don’t think that narrative was very accurate.

I’m no expert at all on Ukraine. I can’t read Ukrainian or Russian, so I have no access to what the media there are saying now, compared with before. If we limit the subject of Ukraine to just media freedom/balance/accuracy do you know if anything changed for the better or worse after the Orange Revolution? If it improved, how did it improve? Is there more diversity?

There will be and must be change, and this is what you are helping happen. Only when they realize (as most do already) what a disservice they do to the image of the country and what ammunition they provide the western, righteous mindset, will they know its time to open and reform the last bastion of insular China.

It was Socrates but could have been Confucius who said an unexamined life is hardly worth living. Without real reporting that provides real context and honesty, how can we live an examined life? It’s an ailment that reflected in many peoples lives here.

We both know there are really very engaged and challenged colleagues who understand this. You are taking them were they can not at this moment go.

Your blogging is helping enlighten. Keep it up.

Sorry. I didn’t mean to be as redundant as that, and I didn’t mean to repeat myself.

Remember the sign-language interpreter (Natalia Dmytruk) in Ukraine who broke the story about Yushenko winning the election over that putz Yanukovitch?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/28/AR2005042801696.html

She’d been instructed to report that Yanukovitch had won, but she went ahead anyway, flying under the official censorship. It was the straw that broke the camels back, and led to the first free election in Ukraine.

Only a very small number of Ukrainians are deaf- in the US, it’s about .25%, and more than half of those people don’t sign. If the numbers are similar in Ukraine, this woman was addressing somewhere around .12% of the population. Yet, she was instrumental in bringing about real, positive change in her country.

Opportunities like that happen once in a lifetime, of course, but the authorities would like nothing better than to discourage honest people from reporting the truth. The current censorship relies absolutely on unspoken intimidation and presumptions of loyalty. China is actually in the middle of a long, slow change, and it will continue to get better if individuals are persistent in their efforts to report the truth.