Media

Mainstream media must provide the context

By Patrick Mattimore (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-06-01 10:13

EXPERT'S TAKE  PATRICK MATTIMORE

The country's national English-language newspaper, China Daily, is celebrating its 30th anniversary. Thirty years is a short time for a newspaper. By way of contrast, The New York Times has been around since 1851 and Britain's newspaper of record, The Times, was founded in 1785.

For a little over half of China Daily's lifetime, the newspaper has been online as well as in print.

Being relatively young and operating under different constraints than the Western press presents both opportunities and challenges for Chinese media.

The newspaper industry is expanding, while in the West, the press is consolidating and contracting. Chinese newspapers are in a position to take the opportunity and be an innovative news force on the world stage.

One challenge facing newspapers in China is that if one source gets the story wrong it is likely that other newspapers will follow suit. I recently wrote a Web column for China Daily Online criticizing a news story that was published in all the major Chinese English language media. The story's headlines uniformly overstated the results of a survey. The fact that CD Online published my criticism the day after the story appeared suggests that Chinese media are both open to criticism and willing to correct mistakes.

Of course, the Western press is subject to oversight problems resulting in mistakes too. Newspaper chains pick up news feeds from wire services without verifying the reports. Journalists succumb to the type of press herd-think mentality that resulted in US reporters failing to investigate the Bush administration claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

I have noticed that the media in China is becoming more willing to tackle some tough issues. Within the last year, for example, there was a widely publicized op-ed written by a Chinese professor arguing that China should abolish the death penalty. The fact that the government is open to airing that issue is promising.

Finally, the challenge for media in China will be to stay relevant as the Internet almost inevitably becomes the first source for information. There is more diversity in news reporting today than there has ever been. Newspapers and television have the opportunity to be an authoritative source that can help people contextualize all the buzz they hear from the Internet. China Daily is well-positioned to be an important part of that development over the next 30 years.

Patrick Mattimore is a fellow at the US-based Institute for Analytic Journalism, an adjunct law instructor in the Temple University/Tsinghua University LLM program in Beijing, and writes a regular weekly column for China Daily Online.

(China Daily 06/01/2011 page20)