Presented at Forum to Commemorate World Press Freedom Day, Kuala Lumpur (6 May 2004).

 Free Press in the United States and China

Li Xiguang

Center for International Communications Studies
Tsinghua University
Beijing, China

In war nothing is too deceitful.
        -- Sun Zi (Chinese military strategist of the sixth century BC)

 “This is London.” When Edward Murrow said these three words, he meant that his listeners would get both good news and bad news from his broadcast, but not deceptive information.

But in the age of satellite TV broadcasts and global communications, what are we watching on TV everyday? News or propaganda? Truth or lies? Over a year has passed since the American invaded Iraq March 20, 2003, people have been seeing, hearing and even smelling the war with their eyes, ears and noses simultaneously with satellite TV broadcast. But can we trust our own eyes, ears and noses in the age of globalization and global communications? Who is defining the news we are consuming everyday? Media critics have theorized that news reporting is a subjective reconstruction of the objective world instead of objective reporting of the real world. In the age of information decentralization and fragmentization, the flow of international news on the contrary is becoming more centralized. The global flow of information continues to be one way and unbalanced. The media corporate giants such as CNN and Murdoch are becoming global dominating forces, leaving the forces for democracy, diversity and decentralizations scrambling to catch up. 

I feel grateful to the organizers and sponsors of the forum in Kuala Lumpur today, which allows me to commemorate the World Press Freedom Day by starting a debate on the most controversial thing of media coverage of the Iraqi war. Here I want share my observations and experiences with Chinese TV coverage of the war.

Between March 20 and April 10 in the year 2003, twenty-four hours day and night, almost one billion Chinese viewers sat glued to their television sets as soldiers were fighting and bombing. They were watching live coverage of government leaders’ speeches one after another, government press conferences one after another, official slogans and national flags one after another. They were watching government and military approved and organized trip of the so-called embedded journalists who were traveling, eating, sleeping, chatting, laughing, fearing and dying with soldiers. These embedded journalists were broadcasting live with “their” troops. You may think it was just a classic propaganda of the communists and their controlled media. You are wrong. The Chinese were watching CNN and Rupert Murdoch’s channels. Since the first day of the war, the Chinese government handed over the country’s five most popular TV channels to CNN and Murdoch. All the images, messages and sentiments the Chinese audience got from TV were filtered out through the gate-keepers of CNN and Murdoch’s people.

Since the war broke out, the three most watched Chinese government channels and the two most watched channels which were jointly owned by the Chinese government and Murdoch hired simultaneous translators who live parroted CNN and Fox 24-hour broadcasts for almost two weeks.

In covering a big event, a good journalist work this way: “I come. I see it. I report it. And I win.”

But during the Iraqi war, almost all the Chinese journalists work this way: “We do not come. We do not see it. We do not report it. But we use CNN. And we win it.”

As you can imagine, CNN and Murdoch’s TVs did wins the hearts and minds of the Chinese with the official messages and journalistic language from the White House and Pentagon. China probably was the world’s only country where anti-war voice was not heard in the press . Such terms as “invasion”, “occupation,” “resistance” are illegal words in reporting Iraq war and post Iraq War. The state media have been advised to use words “Allied troops” to term American and British troops and to use words like “Iraqi armed elements” to term Iraqi resistance forces.

Last winter, I went to the US to attend a meeting in Denver. In a hotel deeply located in the snowy Rocky Mountains, I turned on the TV, watching Iraqi war. To my surprise, the perspective, framing, the languages and even the war propaganda clichés used by American TV channels were no different from the Chinese state TV. “Why American Iraqi IV coverage follows the line of the Chinese government TV?” I asked an American colleague the next morning. “The communists have taken over American TV stations,” he said.

Of the 3,000 international journalists reporting from Iraq during the war, not a single Chinese journalist was working there. Before the war, the Chinese media overjoyed about the coming war because they thought it would bring them competitive edge in the country’s prosperous media market. They sent over 100 journalists to Iraq border preparing to cover the war. But the Chinese authorities finally banned all of them from entering Iraq to report the war. They were only allowed to report U.S. government and military briefings in the American and British government information center in Qatar or staying with U.S. marines and reporting from the deck of U.S. aircraft carrier from the Gulf. When Mr. Shui Junyi, China’s star reporter, refused to leave Baghdad trying to become the first Chinese journalist reporting live from Iraq, the Chinese ambassador escorted him out of Iraq with his limousine, making sure the Chinese reporter would not sneak back into Baghdad.

In the Qatar-based government press conference room, according to report by the Chinese official news agency China News Agency, the U.S. government and military spokesman favored Chinese reporters more than any other country’s journalists. On one occasion, he praised a Chinese journalist for asking a good question. Delighted by the praise from the US military, the Chinese press carried the news of being praised by the US spokesman extensively, pushing the other Chinese journalists work harder to please the US military spokesman.

The government had a good reason of banning Chinese journalists of going to Iraq to cover the war. “We don’t want our journalists be killed by the war.” It sounds like that the Chinese government is the only government who cares about the life and safety of journalists in the world and the Chinese government cares more about human rights of journalists than any other government. But Chinese editors disclosed that the real reason the government decided to ban the journalists from entering Iraq was that the government did not want to see another “accidental” bombing and killing by the American military. Chinese government had a nightmare in 1999 when the NATO bombed Chinese embassy in Belgrade and killed three Chinese journalists, which aroused a nationwide students protests against the American-led war in Kosovo and the killings of journalists. As a display of their good feelings of embracing globalization, the government officials did not want to take any risk of seeing any public display of sentiments, feelings and protests which would make American government feel unhappy again.

In the age of globalization, the Chinese TV audience are increasingly becoming passive subjects of manipulation and control by the country’s 13 state TV channels and 9 Murdoch-owned channels.

Many western journalists praised China’s state TV’s live transmitting of CNN as the beginning of an uncensored news report in China, the dawning of press freedom in the totalitarian or dictatorship society. The only interruption and element the Chinese TVs added during relaying of CNN was that Chinese TVs invited some military strategists and pundits sitting around a table, watching CNN and chatting about the war in a light-hearted atmosphere as if they were playing chess or an electronic game. The TV commentators and pundits tend to deal with the war with a sense of aesthetics. Fascinated by the state-of-art warships, warplanes, guided-missiles, war vehicles and tanks on CNN, Chinese TVs tried to teach the Chinese audiences to appreciate the killing machines from the cameramen’s angel of a beautiful sunset and morning sunlight. The killing and bombing by the military have become a militainment on the country’s TVs.

     What the audiences eventually got from the live coverage of CNN via the state and local TVs were memorable pictures of falling statues, cheering Iraqis and the beautiful high-tech weapons but not the toll of the civilians of the war and the context of the war. The state TVs which have been filtered by CNN and Murdoch were not interested reporting the number of civilians killed in the war. On Chinese TVs. Everyone is talking about the importance of Basra as a military city, but no one talks about the historical and cultural riches of the city which is known for its tales in the Arabian Nights. No one remembers that it is the port city where the legendary traveler Sinbad departed for China hundreds of years ago. The TV viewers did not see the destruction of cradle of human history and the Babylon culture. They did not see the looting of the museums and libraries. They only saw the Iraqi cheering the toppling of the dictator’s statue. By relaying CNN and Fox, many TVs are becoming the tongue and throat of the American government.

 If we define press freedom and independent media as following the lines of the White House or the Pentagon, the Chinese media did become freer and more independent.

CNN and Fox News Channel following the government line lauding the war as a war of bringing freedom and reporting the American soldiers as “liberators”.  But what is freedom? Can we enforce the First Amendment on a global scale? Can we have a global democracy which means to protect the underdog country’s right to speak and make sure the voice of the weak countries be heard?

The American journalism has long been regarded as a model for many countries which are seeing an emerging free press. Journalists in developing countries admire the American press for its brave coverage of Vietnam War and the Pentagon Paper. But if the model functions consciously and unconsciously as a war monger, it would be a great setback for the those countries with a press which is always telling stories according to US media.

During the Invasion of Iraq, the American government propaganda designed by its spin doctors has been full of symbols, slogans and images which immediately became the journalistic language in the press of many countries and read more like news than propaganda. Since most media in developing countries did not send journalists to Iraq to experience and witness all news events, CNN and Fox’s live coverage naturally become what most of the international community believe as the most reliable channels for providing information to the public.

Since most people in the developing countries believe that American journalists enjoy the freest free press and serves as a model for their future journalism, the journalists and viewers in the developing world rarely suspect that American journalists are sometimes also gullible to their government and military propaganda.

When the official Chinese press were filled with war-glorifying stories dispatched by the their correspondents aboard the U.S. aircraft-carrier, the Chinese correspondents along with their readers and viewers never realized that the official propaganda frame was embedded in the minds of most embedded journalists. The framing serves them as guideline in planning topics, selecting sources, using of filming angle and lighting and in selecting and deleting a content. They did not know that their news reporting has served as the camouflage of the government propaganda.

In a war, it is understandable that the government and the military tries to control and manipulate domestic and international public opinion in order to boost the soldier’s morale and put pressure on enemy’s emotion. The Pentagon has skillfully used the doctrine of Sun Zi: “In war nothing is too deceitful.”

But few Chinese journalists realize that truth is the first casualty of war. On Chinese TV, journalists were rarely heard challenging the government versions and interpretations of the war, even though when the officials gave obviously deceptive information. Many Chinese journalists refuse to believe that in a free society like the US, the media are also relying heavily on government sources in covering a war.

Most TV viewers do not know that what they saw and heard on TV is not the real life of the war. It is a world seen through the frame of the global media such as CNN and Fox. The images, angles, the lighting and other elements and content the TV viewers were watching was the subjective reality of the journalists and their sources or a mediated reality of the real life. Like the journalists working with the global media, they were so easily given to cheating or deceiving by the government propaganda, broadcasting a lot of misleading information, deceptive and dishonest stories.

American soldiers being killed was widely covered. No coverage of the illegal detentions of civilians, illegal search of people’s homes, the plight of women and children, the daily life and frustrations in an occupied land. 

Today, everyone is talking about a booming market economy in the age of globalization. A market economy encourages competing perspectives, diversified frames, all possible angels in news reporting. But experiences with the satellite TV coverage of Iraq shows that living in the global media system, the international audiences are looking at international events in a more narrow and stereotyped way.

     The landslide victories of CNN and Murdoch in China during the Iraq War show that living in the age of globalization, it is difficult to know the truth of news. The first step of getting closer to truth is to be freed from the bird cage of the government propaganda and global media. No more picture or live broadcast of an embedded journalist bragging atop a military vehicle or aboard a aircraft carrier. As journalist I.F. Stone pointed out that all governments are manipulated by liars. I.F. Stone might sound extreme, but his critical and skeptical spirit is vanishing among both Chinese and American journalists in the age of globalization. To get free from the propaganda prison house, whether the international community or the American public, should both have easy access and the desire to all sorts of views, angles, frames and focuses in news reporting. And that could only come when the international community is able to watch CNN, BBC, Fox, CCTV, Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabiya and Abu Dhabi all at the same time when the Third Gulf War comes.

     A global press freedom does not mean according to American press or according to the White House. If global press freedom means that the international audience hear only one voice, see pictures only from one perspective and get information only from one sources, what does dictatorship mean?

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