China lays out welcome mat to media giants
Posted: Friday, October 09, 2009 5:13 PM
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Beijing, China
By NBC News' Bo Gu
BEIJIJNG – One week after China celebrated 60 years of communist rule, several hundred representatives from more than 100 overseas media groups and 40 Chinese media are gathering in Beijing for the World Media Summit to discuss major shifts and challenges in the news industry.
The summit, which opened Friday, is sponsored by nine media giants including The Associated Press, Reuters and BBC, and hosted by Xinhua, China’s official press agency. Its theme is "Cooperation, Action, Win-Win and Development."
Participants included News Corp. Chairman & CEO Rupert Murdoch, AP President & CEO Thomas Curley, Reuters News Editor-in-Chief David Schlesinger, BBC Director-General Mark Thompson, Special Consultant to NBC News Jeff Gralnick, and NBC Foreign News Director Chris Hampson. (MSNBC.com is a joint venture of NBC Universal and Microsoft Corp.)
The gathering of media industry bigshots is another notch in China’s ambitious plan of displaying its soft power on world stage – not only with a speedy economic growth and colossal military might but also with a prodigious media empire that can compete with other international press giants.
Underscoring the importance of the event, Chinese President Hu Jintao attended the opening session.
Apparently addressing the issue of perceived unfair coverage of China by Western journalists, Hu appealed to the world's media to "uphold social responsibilities … objectively report the reality of the multi-polarity of the world, economic globalization and diverse civilizations."
For some, the summit offered a platform to urge China to further push media reforms."The policy then was called ‘the Open Door,’" said Murdoch. "China now has a chance to open its digital door."
While welcoming China's ambition to build global media giants, Murdoch cautioned that the pestering problem of intellectual piracy in China still needs to be addressed. "I fear the ability of creative companies to prosper globally could be undermined by a lack of intellectual property protection domestically," he said.
Curley echoed the call against piracy. "We don't get paid appropriately for our hard work and the risks we take," he said. "Free-riders and pirates are claiming they're entitled to our property."
Schlesinger urged China to loosen its control of the journalistic freedom and careers of its own citizens."I look forward to Chinese nationals having full careers within foreign media organizations in China," he said. "My fervent wish is that one day soon Reuters’ financial news editor in China will be a Chinese national – one step on that person's path to be global editor in chief."
Ironic venue for free press summit
The irony of the event, as many Chinese and international organizations were quick to point out, is that China remains one of the few countries in the world that still has extremely limited freedom of speech – particularly when it comes to reporting on news and political events. The two government departments, Central Publicity Department and China Administration of Radio, Film and Television, have absolute grip on all the media in the country, and are viewed as the mouthpiece ( the "throat and tongue" in Chinese) of the Communist Party’s rule.
"We have to remember when we're talking about these global media initiatives by the Communist Party that we're not talking really about Chinese media per se. We are talking about central-level party media, about Xinhua News Agency, People's Daily and China Central Television," explained David Bandurski, a research associate at Journalism and Media Study Center of the University of Hong Kong. "But a lot of the most vibrant professional activity in Chinese journalism happens elsewhere, at commercial publications such as Caijing magazine, at metro newspapers such as Southern Metropolis Daily, and now also in the blogosphere."
He added that despite the public push, the atmosphere for journalism in China on a more local level is getting worse. "This central party policy of 'going out' into the global market has nothing whatsoever to do with these media, and this media push is in fact happening against the backdrop of a worsening environment for domestic media in China."
There’s speculation that the fallout from coverage of the Tibet riots in March 2008 prompted China’s strong will to build a powerful media empire, but it’s still a little bit too early to tell where all these efforts are leading to.
