Via Danwei, ESWN has translated and reposted a very interesting, short post (Chinese) by Xinhua journalist Wu Hao. Titled, "A reporter can lose independent judgment at press conferences", the article is Wu Hao's rebuke of some of his colleagues for being too credulous at press conferences, and accepting information presented at face value. From ESWN's translation:

I thought to myself: Right now, press conferences have become one of the major channels through which reporters obtain information.  The reporter[s] rely on and believe in these press conferences because it is simple and easy to just report what was announced at the press conferences.  Someone said it and I just report it as is.  I will have accomplished my professional duty to "report things as they were."  There is no thought about verifying the truthfulness of the information that was announced at the press conferences.

At the foot of his post, ESWN's author, Roland, poses his own question:

Is the above newsroom story so elementary that you are scoffing at the backwardness of Chinese official media practices?  Oh, wait, but stenography is not limited to China.  It also exists in places such as the New York Times

Quite so. Journalists everywhere have been guilty of occasional credulity. Nevertheless, it seems to me that China's media is at a rather different state of overall development than Western media. It also carries with it the legacy of having grown quite recently from filling a much different social role than Western media. This is not meant to be a comparative criticism, or a judgment on whether Chinese or western media is "better". It is simply meant to provide some context for comparison.

With those thoughts in mind, I've a few observations of my own. I've managed and attended a lot of press conferences in China, and have seen Chinese journalists to ask some tough, penetrating questions and deliver some hard-boiled interviews. I've also seen press releases and press event stenography (commonly distributed to attending journalists) published more or less verbatim in apparently credible media. I think it's relatively hard to generalize about Chinese journalists with regards to their credulousness at PR events.

But a lot of the journalists we deal with on a daily basis are quite young and relatively inexperienced, a product perhaps of the rapid growth of the Chinese media over the past few years. It seems to me that the lessons that Wu Hao is delivering in his post are very much the lessons that an experienced journalist or editor anywhere would deliver to junior reporters: Question the assertions made; corroborate; think for yourself. That's advice that probably applies anywhere that journalists aren't explicitly expected to repeat the government line.

And that raises the next point. I note that both of the examples that Wu Hao cites in his articles are press conferences given by local government or civil administration bodies. Most of the events I observe are given by foreign companies. You need not have been in China for long to know that foreign companies and even local government bodies have different kinds of relationships with the Chinese press. Challenging foreign companies is widely considered an appropriate and desirable thing to do. But China is not long out of a phase of its history when the press was essentially an organ for government propaganda. Some media in China still serve that purpose, although they are no longer the majority of titles.

Do the vestiges of a culture of government infallibility still linger in China? Where the central government is concerned I'd say yes -- with carefully circumscribed exceptions such as the polemics and editorials in the People's Daily that signify changes of policy direction. Where provincial or local governments are concerned, I am not as certain. But based on the history of the relationship between media and government in China, might young journalists here still be inclined to automatically give even local government organizations the benefit of the doubt? If so, that would be a substantial difference from the media culture in the United States where challenging government at all levels is seen as one of the media's explicit responsibilities (even if, as ESWN notes, it is not always pursued with complete vigor).

Finally, this makes me wonder how Chinese journalism schools teach young, would-be journalists. How is the relationship between government and media illuminated? What journalistic approaches to press conferences in general and government ones in particular are cultivated in student journalists? This is something I've not discussed with  any of my Chinese journalist friends. But I rather think I will. If I learn anything interesting, I'll share it here.

 What's changed?

 Chinese media, 1953 to now -- spot the change.

Note: 1953 People's Daily scan from Doubleleaf's Flickr page. Recopied due to nanny's Flickr block.

Update:
Related to the comment thread below is an op-ed piece (which also cites ESWN, I note) from the Wall Street Journal by Kristin Jones of the Committee to Project Journalists:

When Chinese reporter Zhou Kai discovered in April that patients in the city of Laiyang in Shandong province were receiving intravenous injections of counterfeit medicine, he managed to get inside a hospital to talk to the family and doctors of a comatose patient. Then he interviewed the deputy director of an apparently indifferent local Food and Drug Administration. But before his article could be published, the local Communist Party's propaganda department got word of Mr. Zhou's investigation.

In a move perfectly attuned to the current mix of Party power and capitalist sensibilities in China, officials from Laiyang offered an advertising package to Mr. Zhou's employer at the major national newspaper China Youth Daily. The newspaper's officially appointed management blocked the story from publication.

Worth a read. When the best investigative journalism is often silenced, the incentive to be a hard-driving journalist probably also suffers. This topic has also been explored by Charlie at Positive Solutions.