Live Coverage of Lies or Truth?
By Li Xiguang
In the age of globalization, the Chinese television audience is increasingly becoming the passive subject of manipulation and control by thirteen state TV channels and nine Murdoch-owned channels.
Many people praised the live transmission of CNN by the state TV stations as the beginning of uncensored news reports in China, the dawn of press freedom in this totalitarian or dictatorial society. The only element that Chinese TV stations added to these relayed broadcasts of CNN were segments with Chinese military strategists and pundits sitting around a table, watching CNN and chatting about the war in a light-hearted atmosphere as if they were playing Chinese chess or an electronic game. The Chinese TV commentators and pundits dealt with the war with a sense of aesthetics. Fascinated by the state-of-art warships, warplanes, guided-missiles, war vehicles and tanks on CNN, Chinese TVs tried to teach their audiences to appreciate the killing machines as they were shown from the cameramen's angle against a beautiful sunset or the morning sunlight.
What the Chinese got from their screens were memorable pictures of falling statues, cheering Iraqis, and beautiful high-tech weapons. What they did not get was the toll and context of the war. The state programming, which had been filtered by CNN and Murdoch, was not interested in reporting the number of civilians killed in the war. Chinese news programs talked about the importance of Basra as a military city, but not the historical and cultural riches of the city. No one remembered that it is the port city where the legendary traveler Sinbad departed for China. In this sense, the Chinese state networks are becoming the tongue and the throat of the American government. If we measure the freedom of the press and the independence of the media by how close they follow lines set by the White House and the Pentagon, the Chinese press did become freer and more independent.
CNN and Fox followed the Pentagon line lauding the war as bringing freedom, depicting American soldiers as liberators. But what is freedom? Can we enforce the First Amendment on a global scale? Can we have a global democracy, which requires us to protect the underdog's right to speak and to make sure that the voice of the weak countries be heard?
American journalism has long been regarded as a model for many Chinese journalists for its brave coverage of Vietnam War and the Pentagon Papers. But if the model functions consciously and unconsciously to glorify war, it would be a great setback for those countries with an emerging free press.
During the Invasion of Iraq, the American government's propaganda was filled with symbols, slogans and images which immediately became the journalistic language in the Chinese press, where they read more like news than propaganda. Since the Chinese media did not send journalists to Iraq to experience and witness news events, CNN and Fox's live coverage naturally became what most Chinese believe to be the most reliable channels for providing information to the public.
Since most Chinese believe that American journalists enjoy the freest free press in the world, and since the American press serves as a model for the future of Chinese journalism, Chinese journalists and viewers never suspect that American journalists can sometimes fall prey to government and military propaganda.
When the official Chinese press was filled with war-glorifying stories dispatched by its correspondents from the U.S. carrier, the Chinese correspondents, along with their readers and viewers, never realized that the official propaganda frame was embedded in the minds of most embedded journalists. This framing provides them with guidelines as to how best plan topics, select sources, choose filming angles and use light, and how to select and delete content. They did not know that their news reporting served to camouflage the government propaganda.
In a war, it is understandable that the government and the military try to control and manipulate domestic and international public opinion in order to boost soldiers' morale and put pressure the enemy. The Pentagon has skillfully used the doctrine of Sun Zi: "In war nothing is too deceitful."
But few Chinese journalists realize that truth is the first casualty of war.
On Chinese TV, journalists were rarely heard challenging the Pentagon versions and interpretations of the war, even when the officials gave obviously deceptive information. The Chinese journalists refused to believe that in a free society like the US, the media rely heavily on government sources when covering a war.
The Chinese audiences did not know that what they saw and heard on TV was not the real life of the war. It was a world seen through the frame of the global media such as CNN and Fox. The images, angles, the lighting, and the content the Chinese were watching was the subjective reality created by journalists and their sources. It was a mediated reality. Like the journalists working with the global media, Chinese audiences were too easily cheated and deceived by government propaganda, which was broadcasting a lot of misleading information along with deceptive and dishonest stories.
Today, everyone is talking about a booming market economy in China. It is said that a market economy encourages competing perspectives, diversified frames, the use of all possible angles in news reporting. But China's experience with the TV coverage of Iraq shows that, due to their living in the global media system, Chinese audiences are looking at international events in a more narrow and stereotyped way.
Stephen Philion Assistant Professor, Dept. of Sociology St. Olaf College http://www.stolaf.edu/depts/sociology/People/faculty-staff/steve.html