China’s World Service, An Al-Jazeera Of Its Own

Modeling a proposed 24-hour cable news channel on Al-Jazeera is bound to be taken the wrong way in the U.S. and set false expectations elsewhere. But that is the model that Beijing reportedly has at the heart of a 45 billion yuan ($6.6 billion) investment in its three main state media, Xinhua, CCTV and the [...]

Beijing Reins In Quake Press Coverage

This Bystander has noted before the potential political fault line that quake-collapsed schools may be. Now the FT is reporting that the government has instructed domestic media to rein in coverage of the schools that collapsed during last month’s devastating earthquake.
A notice was sent to media outlets across the country late last week, following a [...]

Shoddily-Built School Collapses Test Beijing’s Openness

An FT report that some parents of children killed in a school collapse in the Sichuan earthquake are considering legal action against local officials they believe responsible for sub-standard construction highlights the growing point of protest in what has otherwise being a “good” disaster response for the authorities.
The school in question, a middle school in [...]

How Much Has The Olympic Torch Burned China’s Reputation?

As the Olympic torch continues on the Asian leg of its journey to Beijing, it has left behind TV images of chaos from Paris, London and San Francisco. This Bystander has noted China’s PR problem before, but what damage, if any, has that done to China’s international reputation? Media Tenor, a media research company that [...]

Tearing Up The Script In Tibet

The best laid plans…
The tightly scripted official tour of Tibet for a group of foreign journalists ran amok for 5 mins in Jokhang, Tibet’s holiest temple. Thirty young monks surrounded the tour party and shouted that there was no religious freedom in the region, that the government was lying about who was responsible for the [...]

Foreign Press Taken To Tibet

A group of Beijing-based foreign correspondents has been being escorted to Lhasa to report on the situation there, Xinhua reports. This 26-strong “international media delegation” includes representatives of the AP, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Russian, Japanese and Taiwanese news agencies, al-Jazeera and the South China Morning Post. TV media such as [...]

Fact Checking Two Views Of Tibet

Xinhua annotates screen shots from Western TV and websites to show up reporting errors in their coverage of Tibet.
This follows Sunday’s apology by German TV station RTL for using a picture of Tibetan protestors in Katmandu in a report on the recent disturbances in Lhasa.

More Xinhua excoriation of the CNN, BBC and the Berliner [...]

Two Views Of Tibet

This Bystander noted earlier how Beijing’s clampdown on media coverage was polarizing views inside and outside of China about what is happening in Tibet. The FT’s Richard McGregor and Jamil Anderlini have done the reporting to back up my assertion. This paragraph is telling:
One intellectual from Beijing, usually vehemently opposed to the party, said [...]