"China can't buy itself credibility"

I've worked in the performing arts industry in China, and I've been baffled how every article published in a newspaper is bought and paid for. Any review, critique, or story (at least in the culture industry) must be paid for, and in some cases pre-written for it to get published. As far as Im concerned, there is no such thing as journalism in China.

Hi Devi... I wish I could remember how many times I've heard the phrase "There is no such thing as journalism in China".

I do believe there are talented reporters in China that, given the opportunity, would produce excellent journalism. But unfortunately, as you refer to, the system is broken. And a new TV channel or newspaper doesn't help fix it.

The China Newsweek english edition has been published in the US already, It has eleven offices list on their English magazine, they are in New York, Vancouver,Washington, Los Angles ,London, Tokyo, Sydney, Paris, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Moscow. There annual subsciption fee in the US is 19.9 dollar.

let's be honest about the media in china,of course they print what the gov.wants. but they are no different in the usa. just look at the last election. it was the first time that i remember that a canidate dictated what question can and can't be asked during a debate and by god ALL the media networks complied.

Marky is honest. As least in China you know where you stand and not wthat they want you to believe..AKA The foxnetwork,CNN,CBS,NBC..T hey are so in the pockets of the poilitcans that is a womder that any one in the U.S. really knows what is going on.Freedom of the press.Ha When was the last time there was honest reporting about what really mattered.. The last election was a joke and the news media elected the president..Not the people..The people vote as to what the here reported ..The term spin Doctor is an american classic. I think for prople to condem what they do not understand is a joke..The american government is no different than the Chinese government..(a one party system) who ever is in charge is running the show..Except in china is not controlled by big business and everyone does not have their hand out. Just remember what Thomas Jefferson said.."remember that any government that give you rights; can take them away anytime they want to"

All the talk about "journalism" regardless of who it's from, East - West, may be pointless, because most people will just go online and read what they want to read - believe what they want to believe - and write what they want to write - take everyone here for example - myself included. Let's just all be grateful some people are still willing to fork out good money and employ writers who would probably be blogging for free. At the end of the day, your point of view will be based on which side your bread is buttered - so journalists are no better or worse than lawyers who defend the guilty or the innocent.

Cam said: "But before we start considering an international Xinhua TV channel, what happened to CCTV 9? Isn't CCTV 9 supposed to present China's view to the world? Is there a point in lauching a second one without fixing the first?"

I think the issue with CCTV9 is that foreigners aren't its real audience - most viewers are probably Chinese students trying to learn English, so the news it gives can't be too far removed from what's on the Chinese channels. An "international" channel that isn't available in China wouldn't have that problem.

Al Jazeera has succeeded because it strives to be objective and covers stories and gives a voice to subjects deemed below the radar by American, British and European TV corporations. There is potential for an east Asian Al Jazeera-type TV network to be equally successful, but I doubt China has the will or the credibility as a neutral player to pull this off. Having worked at China Daily, I have seen exactly how much autonomy foreign staff are allowed. None. The few experienced journos they managed to recruit did not fit in and were soon pushed out or jumped.

> we received a notice from management, connected to the
> central government, about exactly which order and which
> stories we MUST run. If the US government tried to do this,
> it would be mocked by reporters.

Actually that the Bush administration was very effective in controlling the media, including the stories and the tone of the message, especially on the first 4 years. Google "Fox News internal memos" and also "Scott McLellan".

Hello Cam, thanks for the interview on Radio Australia this week. Here's a link to the feature:

Huge cash injection to China state media
http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/connectasia/stories/200901/s2466621.htm

Presenter: Adam Connors
Speakers: Cam MacMurchy, media consultant to CCTV and other China media organisations; John Marcom, former vice-president of Yahoo! and former president of Time Inc International; Bruce Dover, head of ABC's Australia Network and former News Limited executive

Deutsche bank recieves funding from UBS bank for investment in China --reuters February 2009:

====================================================
UBS crisis: Global bank trouble is getting worse
Posted Oct 16 2008, 06:53 AM by Douglas McIntyre Rating: Filed under: banking, credit crisis, earnings
The Swiss pride themselves in being calm, reserved people. Unlike the Spanish, English, Germans, and French, they have never given the world much trouble.

The trouble, it appears, has been visited upon the Swiss, although they do have some of the blood of the credit crisis on their hands.

For reasons no one can fathom, UBS of Switzerland decided that it had a larger appetite for mortgage-related financial instruments than any other bank in the world. Its balance sheet became obese with the junk and forced it to take what seemed like a write-off a week. UBS has fired so many people that it is surprising it still has someone to man the switchboard.

Things have gotten worse at UBS, and it only took a couple of months. The last time the bank reported earnings it did not indicate that it might be found face down in an alley in Zürich.

Matters have gotten so bad that UBS has had to take a $5.3 billion investment from the Swiss government. It is more awful than that. The FT reports that "UBS, one of the largest casualties of the US credit crisis, would also transfer $60bn -- the overwhelming majority -- of its illiquid U.S. securities to a new entity owned and controlled by the Swiss National Bank."

That $60 billion is nearly 25% of the money Paulson is investing in U.S. banks and UBS is only one firm headquartered in a country best known for making expensive watches for people who work on Wall Street.

==============================
Re: Swiss Bank UBS in serious trouble after $42bn in losses.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Quote:
Originally Posted by AjaxPress
It's nothing a government bailout can't solve.

You think the Swiss have $44.2bn of tax money to give to a bank???

=============================
Calling UBS "one of the banks worst affected" by the credit crisis, Chris Skinner, chief executive at think-tank Balatro, said a number of the cuts would be likely to affect trading operations, following moves made by other banks recently.

"There is a move to more and more algorithmic trading. A recent report speculated that by 2015 nine out of 10 traders would be redundant, and systems would be doing their jobs, but I think this is an exaggeration. You're only as good as a system set up by people."

There has been much speculation over the future of algorithmic trading, heavily used by hedge funds, after a computer model's failure to deal with the unpredictable markets led a Goldman Sachs fund to lose £750 million last August.

UBS may be likely to reduce the staff working on back office functions, Skinner suggested, adding that many banks in UBS' position were automating back office functions. "A lot of people still have documents held in paper repositories and there's a lot of manual box-ticking."

Last year, UBS announced it was expanding its back office operations in India in a bid to cut costs.

But Skinner said with so much being stored on paper, there were clear limits to where banks such as UBS could outsource. "If you need a paper document urgently, it's no good having it in India," he saiinfoworld.com/news/feeds/08/05/06/UBS-layoffs-trouble-IT-department-workers.html

=========================================
Today- now

U.S. ‘Bad Bank’ Plan Gets Momentum to Revive Lending (Update3)
Email | Print | A A A

By Robert Schmidt and Craig Torres

Jan. 16 2009 (Bloomberg) -- Renewed questions about U.S. banks’ viability are pushing regulators toward a new plan that would remove toxic assets from bank
===
and cont]]Ackermann, who is also head of Deutsche Bank AG, Germany’s biggest bank, said “the real challenge here” is determining the price at which to remove the assets. He added, in a conference call with reporters Jan. 14, that Deutsche Bank doesn’t need to unload illiquid assets into such a bad bank.

Switzerland in October relied on the mechanism to aid UBS AG. The Swiss National Bank and UBS set up a special unit to buy as much as $60 billion in toxic investments from UBS. Zurich- based UBS provided $6 billion in capital, which will be used as first protection against losses. It isn’t clear how stockholders or bond owners would be treated in a bad-bank scenario. In the case of UBS in Switzerland, there was no direct impact on either

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601068&sid=amhKS1g61_J4&refer=home
==============================================================
Deutsche Bank Woes Said to Persist on Credit Bets (Update3)
Email | Print | A A A

By Jacqueline Simmons and Aaron Kirchfeld

Dec. 12 2008(Bloomberg) -- Deutsche Bank AG, shaken last quarter by a $1.68 billion loss trading for the firm’s account, is reeling again, this time from about $1 billion of bad bets in a unit led by credit-trader Boaz Weinstein in New York, people familiar with the matter said.

The magnitude of the group’s loss, and its impact on the firm’s fourth-quarter results, may change as the value of some stakes fluctuate with the markets and the Frankfurt-based bank seeks to unwind positions, according to the people, who declined to be identified because the circumstances haven’t been disclosed.

As of mid-December, some executives gauged the loss to be in the $1 billion range, the people said, noting that the figure may be smaller by the end of the quarter, and cushioned by gains in other units. Deutsche Bank, Europe’s biggest investment bank, posted a profit of 435 million euros ($579 million) last quarter after suffering losses of 1.26 billion euros on proprietary credit and equity trades.

bloomberg.com
=====================================
Reuters February 2009 UBS lends to Deutsche Bank to finance in China
=============
March --Yahoo founder dismisses himself and returns to China--
1994 -- Microsoft chief Bill Gatesheads to and sets up Microsoft in China --dressed in only his casual outfit
====================
=====================
Oh for the pay of a J1 in a free land

Jan 2009-- Murdoch sacks 400 at Melbourne age--Scottish editor given boot
====================

Money makes the world go round-- and when 40 something billion disappears and turns up again then whynot-- a mans got to eat as new York drops towards those minus 40 degrees and those reporters Journos and financial advisors [40,000] who lost jobs cant find their super funds --tired after all their fighting and yelling to stop the crisis see hope in China

Ok, just follow what you said. Chinese media is 70% dictated by Chinese government. And US media is 40% dictated by US government. The conclusion is that they are all dictated by the government and controlled by different benefit group! So no one is better that the other. Where is the fair coverage of the massacre in US that more than 1000 civilian have been killed by the Israeli attacks? Did you see any bashing against Jesus Chris in popular US newspaper? But you can always saw it on Chinese news media against all kinds of God! Whether there is bashing against the president or not is irrelevant. You are just so fortunate being a white in stead of a biological relative of Mr. Oscar Grant (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVsncZ7K584). Where is the extensive coverage in US? Please just keep living in your democratic dream and leave China alone.

@Bear

I couldn't agree more. This goes to the point I made in the original post, which is the problem isn't that China's view isn't being presented, it's that it's not being presented well. On the flip side, just because something is slick and polished doesn't mean it's a reliable source of news (Exhibit A: Fox News).

@Chris

First, I don't particularly like having to approve each article as an administrator, but it's necessary because of the large volume of spam we receive. I can assure you that not once - in the entire two years this blog has been running - has a comment been deleted because of its point of view or editorial stance. In fact, we've only deleted one post in the history of the blog because it was a very personal attack on one of our writers.

On your point regarding state control, I'm unsure where you're going with it. I don't know where you got the 70% and 40% figures from, but I can offer some of my own: CCTV is 100% owned by the central government of China, the American government owns 0% of CNN. Also, while we're at it, 0% in ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox. This doesn't mean, of course, that American networks don't sometimes inject bias, intentionally or unintentionally, into their broadcasts. But based on this ownership scheme, it's a lot less likely they would compared to CCTV. In the US, there is also freedom of choice: because different networks and stations are owned by different corporate interests, there is good variety in editorial positions. If you feel CNN is too pro-America for you, you have the choice to watch PBS, read The New Yorker, or find news from a number of other sources more suited to you.

Finally, you may be surprised to know that Jesus has frequently been given a rough time in US media circles. Besides a famous case in New York where sacred Christian symbols were coated in dung and called "art", there are many outspoken critics (Tom Leykis, Bill Maher, Christopher Hitchens, to name but a few) who frequently mock Christianity and its followers on mainstream television and radio in the United States. In fact, all are proud atheists. You might also wish to note the popularity of the book "The God Delusion" in the United States.

This is not to say the US media structure is without bias, or without problems. But it remains a far more reliable, diverse, free, and fair system than is currently in place in China.

Chris, what nonsense. 40 percent dictated by the US government? How about none. Fair coverage of civilians killed during the Israeli attack? It was all over the media here. Bashing against Jesus Christ in popular US newspapers? Last I checked, Mr. Christ has been dead 2,000 years and is no longer a public figure that newspapers write about. Ah yeah, the line about "fortunate being white." Not sure if you noticed, but we just elected a black man as our president.

One sparrow maketh not a full summer. Chill.

how did you know that there no such thing as journalism in china.