Imagethief

I believe that reporters in China come in two categories, some are heroes (and subsequently get arrested for it), while others are soulless robots with no concept of the true spirit of the press. If you were a reporter for Xinhua, how would you be able to sleep at night knowing so much that you can't report. Yeesh...

I think it would be more appropriatte to say that there are two very different concepts of honesty in China compared with the rest of the world. One of those concepts actually involves honesty.

The example given may not be proper in this case, but the idea /concept is not far from the truth. Overall, I have also found out that the news media in North America favors the bad ones, in China otherwise. In my view the world portrayed by the media in North America is far worse than it really is, in China, far better.

Try not to forget China is a far more populated country than US, Canada, Australia and the most of the countries in Europe. Also the over all culture of China does not, like western society, depend on religion to provide rules and discipline to the irrational human behavior. In China since the ancient time, it has been the education guided by Confucius’ principal. Now in this country of over 1.3 billion, the government is the main institution providing that kind of education to its citizens.

While the PBS, the only TV program partially sponsored by US government is in perpetual fund raising mood, China has 14 or more CCTV programs sponsored by government. There is a theatre program supporting the local theatre, a daily music program for the music lovers, a legal program educating its citizens on legal issues. Their science and education program is full with heart warming stories of people helping people. Watching and listening to them is like hearing priests’ sermons.

Is this so called “mind-control” as you may call it? Or is it helped to provide a more stable environment to this society which has four times more population than US? Obviously the crime rate is much less in China. So if some kind of government involvement in the media could help its people to have a better quality of life, why should we not provide it?

I’ve got so much to say about this debate but worry about how to capture the truth of dogs and reporting in China.

My encounter with a rabies/dog-bite story this week is worth relating perhaps. Beijing authorities report 10 people died in Beijing of rabies and 110,000 people have received rabies shots after getting dog bites.

The distortion of truth in this report was incomprehensible and an insult to the intelligence of Beijingers.

It is true that ten people died in Beijing of rabies but none of them got the disease from a Beijing dog. The victims were all brought here from other parts of the country for treatment in the late stages of their illness and died here.

The backdrop to this is that more than 2,200 people have died of rabies in China this year, up almost 30 percent from last year. In 1996 the number of deaths was less than 300 for the entire country – if that report can be believed. Rabies has been the most deadly infectious disease for the past five months. Death by rabies is one of the most gruesome ways imaginable to go. It’s a terrible, terrible situation that really does need serious action.

Clubbing to death (more gruesome than dieing insanely from rabies I imagine) of thousands of dogs has made world headlines and made China look terrible.

Yet when you’re fed a concoction of misinformation and distorted facts mixed with fear mongering, almost any ends can seemingly justify the means.

I fought against the story all week, sending it back three times. I insisted the facts be put in proper context. There was even an attempt at justifying the distortion by suggesting it was only reporting a fact; ten people did indeed die in Beijing of rabies.

That is not the purpose of journalism I raged; we must put facts in context so the truth can be revealed. I actually got red in the face when I argued that perhaps 15,000 dogs may have died in where? Kunming – because deathly-ill people were brought into that city for treatment after getting rabies somewhere in the countryside?

The last, more conscientious writer to handle the story agreed the city government has an ulterior motive. It’s out to reduce the number of dogs in Beijing and so it has mounted this campaign of distortion, or so it seems.

The result is Beijingers have little understanding of rabies and how it affects pets and people. People who are bitten by their own pets are running off getting anti-rabies injections, as if their dogs, by way of spontaneous generation, had just now become infected.

The fact is there are too many dogs in Beijing which is not a city designed for pets. People raise dogs for all the wrong reasons; it’s fashionable, Western and a status symbol. The health – mental and physical -- of the poor animals, locked all day in tiny apartments, is rarely a consideration. Surelyl, consciousness raising on this front would do more good than any distorted rabies scare.

And the money wasted on 45 clinics that are open 24-hours should be poured into vaccinating animals that are the main threats to the spread of rabies -- stray animals in the countryside. Inoculate all the dogs, inside and outside Beijing, and the disease will disappear.

Yikes! Just where are my priorities with such a suggestion? The country needs to feed its people and care for the health of its masses before it vaccinates canines.

And that’s not true either. The cost of taking effective, real steps to eradicate the disease is likely far less than the cost of treating thousands of humans who die and hundreds of thousand of needless human treatments.

The story also illustrates another fact of human wanting. Everyone, conscious of it or not, strives to live a life without illusion, deceit or fabrication? It’s the very basis of a harmonious society. To be complete citizens, people need to be honestly engaged and even challenged by their society. Life in the world today, like revolution in the past, is not a dinner party.

In the west we think we’re so much better and thump our chests claiming high-ground integrity over the corporate slop that passes as news, while the U.S. media has slipped to 53rd on the Worldwide Press Freedom Index 2006.

(http://www.hrea.org/lists/display.php?headline_id=4656&language_id=1.

In China people believe that basically the opposite of what they’re told is true and it shames the people and the integrity of China that its press freedom is rated fourth from the bottom on the list of 168.

In the end, knowledge won the day on the dog-bite/rabies story. It finally went out as it should have. explaining that no dog in Beijing has passed rabies to a human. A small victory for more truthful reporting, during this year of the dog.

http://www.wangxiaofeng.net/?p=532

this is posted by Wang Xiaofeng, the editor at Sanlian, whereby he started with a line saying the concept that only 'man bite dog' is news is known to everyone who is engaged in journalism(roughly translated). I take it that what he meant by everyone is just...everyone. not limited to 'some western countries' as quoted.

i'm wondering if the information minister has or ever engaged in journalism...
even if he has not, it's better to have someone to vet his press brief beforehand.
or at least can make the statement more general, something like 'for some jourlists, whether or not Chinese or Western, man bites dog...'
btw i think Wang's blog is one of the best covering media in Chinese..