Headlines and Hashtags

All the news that's fit for China

China’s leaders have their own gold standard for truly “objective” international news coverage about China. They call it “guidance of public opinion.”

Dec 23, 2014

To prove its point about how stories can be framed differently, China Daily insists leaders behind protests in Hong Kong are just criminals.
Is it reasonable — is it not preposterous? — to expect professional news reporters to suppress what for China are inconvenient aspects of complicated stories simply because China doesn’t like complication?
In its lede, the China Daily piece snidely referred to the famous Times motto, “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” suggesting the words were a ruse, that in fact the New York Times is “highly selective.”
This should be news to no one. The New York Times motto was never seriously intended as a claim to infinite all-inclusiveness.
American University professor Joseph Campbell tackled the Times motto for the BBC back in 2012, as many have before. Campbell noted that for well over a century the phrase “has been admired as a timeless statement of purpose, interpreted as a ‘war cry’ for honest journalism, and scoffed at as pretentious, overweening and impossibly vague.”
Campbell also shared the cautionary tale of US congressman Wright Patman of Texas, who in 1960 asked the Federal Trade Commission to look seriously into the matter of whether or not the New York Times motto could be construed as false or misleading advertising. The Commission poo-pooed the request: “We do not believe there are any apparent objective standards by which to measure whether ‘news’ is or is not ‘fit to print’.”
There’s no need to harp on this point, any more than there is any sense in bickering over whether Jenny’s Diner on Fifth Street really does have the “world’s best cup of coffee.”
Ultimately, questions about bias in the news are about how news is put together: within what sort of news cultures; under what time and resource constraints; under the influence of what sorts of frames or biases, conscious or unconscious.
No journalist who has ever had to grapple under deadline with fussy or vacuous editors, with limitations of time and space (How vexing that we can’t be everywhere at once!), with all the variables that come with the pursuit of professional journalism . . . No journalist would believe that out there lies some Holy Grail of absolute objectivity, a standard to which every report can be held up. Good journalists try their best under imperfect circumstances to get the story right (as vague as that sounds).
And these days, let’s not forget, foreign correspondents are under more scrutiny than ever from a slew of experts and conscientious amateurs with their own blogs, columns and social media accounts. We pick apart their stories, question their methods. We offer alternatives, or additional background.
The problem for official China, and by extension for the China Daily, is that for them the Holy Grail does exist. China’s strategic interests, refracted through the prism of its national leaders, are the gold standard for journalism.
They may whine about “biased” framing of stories in the New York Times, but the overarching official policy on information control in China (and what they hope for outside China) is “guidance of public opinion” — the dominance, in other words, of the story frames of the Chinese Communist Party.
Just a few days after the China Daily fired its shot across the bow of the New York Times, state media in China huddled together in the southern city of Zhuhai for the 16th annual China International News Forum. The topic on the agenda, the same topic that has been on the agenda since the forum began in 1999, was to “raise the level of international news reporting by Chinese media and strengthen dialogue and cooperation among news media.”