Tim Johnson of McClatchy blogs on an interesting SCMP story (subscription) on efforts by the Central Publicity Department (nee Propaganda Mininistry) to improve the tone of reporting on the Olympics. The theory seems to be that by ordering the local press to report more favorably, lazy foreign hacks who rip all their stories from Chinese media will likewise take a more positive tone:

There’s a big dose of fear in [the authorities concerning the games], too, to match China’s rightly deserved confidence that the Games (the sporting part, that is) will go well. China is getting nervous about what it sees as “intensifying negative publicity.” So it has done what comes natural: tighten the muzzle on the domestic press.

The South China Morning Post reports this morning that officials from the Central Publicity Department (the former propaganda bureau) ordered Chinese journalists last week to begin steering clear of any Olympics stories that would cast the nation in a bad light.

Will it work? To judge from the SCMP article and Tim's blog, I'd say not as well as they hope. PR guidance is a little stage magic. Once you see how it's being engineered it tends to lose its effectiveness. These days the CPD would be wise to assume that any written circulars it issues concerning Olympic publicity will leak to foreign, state secrets notwithstanding. Ideally, it should plan accordingly. Here's an idea: How about some good, old-fashioned PR? You know? Finding good stories and telling them?

The problem with a tradition of media management by command-and-control is that it is ill suited to the demands of a modern media environment. Especially one that involves a global media extravaganza, heaps of controversy and uppity foreign journalists ill-disposed to saluting CPD diktats.

Update: See also this post from Richard Spencer's blog:

[The propaganda department] cannot stop bad news. It knows that. It particularly cannot stop bad news in the western press, and given that our websites remain largely unblocked, perhaps it doesn't care that much.

The authorities are very good, however, at making it appear that bad news is, in the end, marginal, and secondary. In China, the mainstream is positive, progressive, and pro-Communist Party. Other views exist, on many topics are allowed to exist, on some topics are even encouraged to exist, but those who highlight them are oddball, minority, or, as Elle so pertinently put it in a comment to my last blog on the Dalai Lama, "they don't fit into Chinese society".