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The endless effort: Manipulate the Media!

Thursday, July 9, 2009

FROM THE STUDIO, the news anchor attempted a live handover to the correspondent recently arrived in the remote, and bloodily riot-torn desert city. But instead of a calm broadcaster’s voice, we listeners heard only violent shrieks and yells – and for a while pandemonium reigned.

We were tuned to the BBC World Service, and its senior China correspondent Quentin Sommerville had been cued up to come on line with an on-the-spot report from a Uighur street demonstration in Urumqi, capital of the arid Xinjiang region.

 

But as the horrific-sounding bedlam grew louder, Sommerville appeared unreachable.

 

In the best unflappable BBC style, though, the studio team moved on to other stories, and within a few minutes the correspondent was back on line, struggling to speak loudly - if a bit breathlessly - over the crowd noise, contending against extra decibels now as police-sirens suddenly wailed, mixed in with the thunder of water-cannon trucks. Sommerville gave a vivid account of the Muslim protesters - mostly women - crying out for their arrested menfolk to be returned to them, and of the police determinedly dispersing them (- part of the encounter pictured above).

 

Over on the American radio network, NPR, its normally Beijing-based Anthony Kuhn was also in Urumqi (the slightly surprised guest of the government, like all the foreign reporters shipped in overnight) but he chose early on to broadcast from a Han Chinese neighborhood, rather than among the Muslim minority.

 

The Han demonstrations Kuhn witnessed were monitored, but not beaten down, by the riot police. All the same he persuasively portrayed a situation fraught with violence, as he spoke of “a lot of people [that would be ethnic Han people] around me carrying knives and swords and clubs and pipes and hammers”.

 

And on television? Well, in these early hours CNN’s Jaime FlorCruz, who is the dean of the foreign press corps in Beijing, was evidently constrained by his more cumbersome medium. At 1.00 am in Atlanta (his network’s world HQ), the time when BBC Radio was transmitting so dramatically, no live pictures from Urumqi distinguished the channel that describes itself as “the world's television news leader”.

 

And when FlorCruz later got to file a “stand-upper” (to use that graceless but direct term of art) he was actually standing in an empty street, and the footage his video-editor was able to splice in came from Hong Kong Cable TV. These non-CNN moving pictures were buttressed oddly, when FlorCruz referred to seeing “hordes of Han Chinese carrying sticks and pipes”, with still photographs to illustrate the point from Agence France Presse and the Getty photo-agency.

  

  

 

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WHETHER IN TELEVISION’S UNWIELDINESS, in radio’s greater agility, or in the relatively huge (notebooks-only) freedom that print reporters enjoy, journalists covering the Uighur-Han ethnic tumult and the communist authorities’ efforts to tamp it down (and also repress the Muslims back into their subordinate place again) have once more found themselves up against a government’s powerful capacity for manipulating what gets reported.

 

This time, China’s propaganda bosses did more than crudely clamp down on all the new communications tools now available to a discontented citizenry, by blocking cellphone frequencies, and aggressively filtering internet links and instant messaging channels. They turned (somewhat unaccustomedly, for the Chinese) to a considered effort at spinning the news practitioners themselves. Hence the unexpected invitations to the foreign press, including discounted hotel room-rates.

 

“They’re getting more sophisticated”, was the summary of University of California, Berkeley professor Xiao Qiang, who’s a major aggregator of China news on the net. “With foreign journalists, they feel that as long as they can keep those people under control it may serve the governrnent’s purpose.” It was clear from the outset that "the government's purpose" was to have the Uighur Mulsims represented as the unalloyed villains of the piece.

 

And sure enough, keeping reporters "under control" was essential to that purpose. NPR’s Kuhn had to point out that for all the access that appeared to be on offer:  “police would not let us talk to the protesters. I went independently of the group [of reporters] and so police dragged me down to the police station and questioned me for a couple of hours.”

 

Eventually of course, as it always will, the truth will out, via determined reporters and the people themselves.

 

In the meantime, the “more sophisticated” censors of today may win a few rounds.

 

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