State censorship is really the elephant in the room where Chinese media is concerned. Consider this: three senior media practitioners have recently written critiques of the Chinese media, and none of them has mentioned censorship.
All three give their reasons for the decline in popularity of the media in China. For the first, a professor at a reputed journalism school and formerly on the boards of two media groups, the reason for the people “abandoning mainstream media” is the internet. The decline is uniformly visible worldwide, he argues, whether it is in China’s State-run media or America’s privately-owned, market-driven media.
The endless variety of content available on internet platforms can never be matched by traditional media; additionally, news, the USP of mainstream media, is no longer a magnet for people, he says.
Quite the opposite view is taken by the second commentator, also a journalism professor as well as an award-winning former journalist in a State-run daily. For him, the “systemic transformation of the media” — the new official buzzword in China — is meaningless unless the media “transforms around its core assets: exclusive news, in-depth reporting, scrutiny of power…”
Finally is the lament of Hu Xijin, the former editor of the ultra-nationalist, more-loyal-than-the-king official online news portal, Global Times. Nobody, be it celebrities, government officials, academics or executives, voices his or her opinions on social media these days, says Hu, because of the instant backlash these opinions elicit. Hu holds society’s narrowing tolerance responsible for “this collective silence”, which, he says without a trace of irony, “doesn’t belong in an open society.”
Netizens’ reactions to Hu’s post (“Lapdog, stop complaining, you played a part in this”) show that nobody has taken his lament seriously, coming as it does from the man who acted as a super vigilante for the government. But it is not just Hu, it is difficult to take any of these media commentators seriously. Just one incident is enough to show the real culprit behind people losing interest in the Chinese media.
On October 22, around 5 pm, in a small city, a car drove into a bunch of school children and their parents, in what seems to have been a premeditated act. But not a word appeared in any official Chinese media outlet, though a video and photographs of the incident circulated online. It was only three days after the incident that the police
put out a terse note about an “accident” that claimed one life and left four persons seriously injured. The driver had been arrested and charged with “endangering public safety”.
The video shows the driver driving through a red light, accelerating, and then driving right into a group of children and parents waiting on a traffic island outside an elementary school. The photographs show people lying on the ground; books and shoes scattered around. An unofficial news portal posted eye-witness accounts on the Chinese version of Twitter which said that at least nine ambulances had rushed there, and that survivors were being “guarded” in hospitals lest they speak.
This incident was reminiscent of the one that took place last year in the southern city of Zhuhai, where a man drove into people exercising inside a stadium, killing 38. All that was revealed then was that the culprit, who was executed in January this year, was angry after a divorce settlement.
Why was this driver angry enough to kill children?
When netizens flooded the media with questions, especially about the actual death toll, one eveninger posted this on its official account: “Our hands are tied too” with a folded hands emoji.
“Open society”, “scrutiny of power”, anyone?