Friday, November 8, 2013

China Reflects on International Journalists Day

One of the great things about living and working in a nanny state is that whenever things go wrong, you can always blame the nanny.  Which is exactly what The Global Times does as it laments the lack of journalistic standards in the Chinese news community.  

More state regulation is needed, it concludes, failing to appreciate that the central news agency in China is actually state controlled to begin with, but we all know that the cure for all of China's ills is laws and yet more laws on the statute books.  Other newspapers agree, but then, they don't have much of a choice.

Central to the plot that many (state-censored) newspapers are spinning is the detention of Chen Yongzhou.  Identifying a scapegoat to point at and shout derisively  is a long tradition in China, and it certainly didn't happen when Xinhua or CCTV embarked on one of their many cock-ups.  A series of missteps that eventually led many to be believe that a secret experiment designed to discover if bloated, overfed, half-literate baboons could run a news agency.

Xinhua is adept at slinging mud of it's own, attacking CNN and the BBC over it's coverage of the two bomb attacks that hit the capital and Taiyuan.  The Chinese, eager to make the case that China is a world power has has Muslim extremists willing to bomb government buildings to prove it, have derided "Western media" in the quaint 1950's era commie rhetoric that it does so well.

Complaining that the US doesn't recognise the attacks as terrorist driven act is like complaining that a Iraq War veteran with no legs doesn't recognise your appendix scar as a legitimate injury.  The Politburo would be unlikely to sanction US or British boots on the ground in Xinjiang, so it's belligerence towards western media essentially boils down to grandstanding in front of it's own captive audience.

The air, the bloody air, is touted as one of the success stories of Chinese investigative journalism.  It wouldn't be Chinese news if there wasn't some horror story about how bad the pollution is in China.  Wily commentators have pointed out the amusing side note to the ongoing saga of China's AQI that the smog is rendering many of the closed circuit TV systems designed to stop people rebelling against the state and, er, bombing government buildings, completely and totally ineffective.

For many, including the poor eight year old unlucky enough to be diagnosed with lung cancer in Jiangsu, you don't really need to conjure up mythical terrorist threats when the government itself is quite happy to mortgage the health of it's own people in search of ever bigger profits.


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