MCLC: CCTV in America

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: CCTV in America
***********************************************************

Source: Foreign Policy (11/1/12):
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/11/1/coming_to_america_cctv

Coming to America
China wants to buy its way onto your TV screen. Will it work?
BY ALEX PASTERNACK

Last November, Michelle Makori, a business reporter formerly of Bloomberg
News, joined a small group of seasoned Western television journalists for
a whirlwind tour of China. The trip, arranged by China Central Television
(CCTV), the world's largest broadcaster, culminated in a visit to the
network's two headquarters: on the quiet, far west side of Beijing, a drab
campus that sits in the shadow of a giant space needle, and, in the
frenzied Central Business District, the new digs -- a twisted pretzel of
steel and glass dreamed up by Rem Koolhaas's architecture firm
<http://oma.eu/projects/2002/cctv-%E2%80%93-headquarters>, an engineering
marvel that manages to look both muscular and terribly fragile.

Makori and her soon-to-be colleagues had come to China to learn about CCTV
America from their new employers, who had plucked them from other networks
to develop another peculiar headquarters: a roughly 100-person bureau in
the center of Washington, D.C., producing a slick news channel aimed at
delivering China-centric news to a U.S. audience. "China has a place in
the world economy, so it's only befitting that China has a place in the
global media platform," a senior CCTV executive told them, according to
Makori. "The reason you people are before us is because we want to be
recognized as a legitimate, objective journalistic force," he continued.
"The idea is for this to be not a Chinese mouthpiece, not a Chinese
propaganda tool, but a global channel produced with a Chinese flair.'"

Nearly a year later, that vision is coming into focus, and it offers a
curious indication of China's search for soft power. Despite the promise
of wider editorial latitude, CCTV America's coverage of China is largely
scrubbed of controversy and upbeat in tone, with a heavy emphasis on
business and cultural stories in places where Beijing hopes to gain
influence. Reporting on topics sensitive to Beijing, like unrest in
Tibetan regions of China or the Tiananmen Square Massacre is off limits.

Coverage of scandals involving disgraced Chongqing Party chief Bo Xilai
and dissident legal activist Chen Guangcheng -- topics that dominated U.S.
and European headlines over the summer -- were confined to reports that
echoed official government statements. (CCTV America broadcast
<http://english.cntv.cn/program/china24/20120502/114335.shtml> a
stern-faced anchor in Beijing reading the statement "China has called on
the United States to apologize over the issue of a Chinese citizen
entering the U.S. embassy here in Beijing in late April," after Chen
escaped to the U.S. embassy there.)

"Foreign audiences expect to hear stories about China from Chinese media,
and CCTV has nothing to say about the two most important stories of the
year?" asked Michael Anti, a Chinese blogger and free speech advocate.
"Why would an American audience want to listen?"

Since the U.S. bureau began broadcasting in February, CCTV's fresh cast of
reporters and producers have been struggling to answer that question.
Based out of a sparkling new office in Washington, the service comprises a
block of news on CCTV News, the network's recently-revamped 24/7
English-language channel, and covers a range of U.S. and international
stories with a cast of 60 reporters, producers, and technicians who have
experience at established news organizations like CNN, CBS, and the BBC.
Long news pieces, Western accents, slick graphics, live stand-ups in
foreign locales, and prominent guests (the likes of Thomas Friedman
<http://english.cntv.cn/program/theheat/20120415/112781.shtml> and Tom
Brokaw <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UtMjIuHnEc&feature=plcp> have
appeared on a weekend evening talk show called The Heat), emanate a feel
of credibility that has long been absent in CCTV's dull, starchy news
coverage. "They were saying ‘we want you to be doing breaking news and
investigative pieces' and this was the first time a lot of the senior
people in China had heard this," Barbara Dury, a former 60 Minutes
producer who now runs CCTV's Sunday newsmagazine programAmericas Now, said
of initial discussions with top CCTV officials. "And they were asking,
'how's this all going to play out?'"

In a turbulent and uphill battle for the world's hearts and minds, and in
an effort to stem what it sees as anti-China coverage in the Western
media, Beijing's global television gambit -- part of a multi-billion
dollar propaganda push by the Chinese government -- is its most ambitious
yet. And CCTV America is one of the main beneficiaries of Beijing's
largesse. With heavy emphasis on coverage of under-reported places in
Latin America and Africa, the network aims to be what some at CCTV call
"China's CNN." But it takes its biggest cues from Al Jazeera, the
state-funded upstart from Qatar that, despite distribution challenges, has
won many supporters in the United States.

"CCTV's strategy is to find niches where other people have let down the
global TV audience in the English sphere," said Jim Laurie, a two-decade
veteran of ABC who has consulted for new broadcast ventures around the
world, and who is helping CCTV develop its American service. From the new
U.S. headquarters on New York Avenue, less than a mile from the White
House, Laurie and a team of producers and editors, as well as three
Chinese managers who have relocated from Beijing, oversee 16 bureaus in
North and South America, supplementing hundreds of Chinese and African
reporters working at offices in Africa, Europe, and Asia. On another
floor, some 40 Chinese journalists and technicians prepare reports for the
domestic service.

In one corner of the bustling, glassy newsroom, a giant central desk is
surrounded by a phalanx of screens carrying CNN, Fox, Bloomberg, Al
Jazeera, and CCTV's other news channels. Seen together, CCTV's broadcast
looked buttoned-up and serious next to CNN's unceasing parade of graphics
and heavy emphasis on pop culture. (And yet CCTV America surprised The
Atlantic's national correspondent Jim Fallows, who spent three years
living in China and estimated he's watched "thousands" of hours of CCTV,
as he channel surfed. Compared with CNN, "I've generally heard a lot more,
and in a lot more detail and less tendentiously and cutesily, from, gasp,
CCTV America," hewrote
<http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/04/a-cloud-no-bigger
-than-a-mans-hand-cctv-america-dept/256053/> on his blog in April.)

Currently, the bureau produces seven hours of English-language content per
week split across three shows, but plans to grow to over 20 hours by next
spring, and to add over a dozen more producers and correspondents. "The
mentality is expand, expand, expand" said Dury. Half of the service's new
coverage will emphasize business, Laurie said, "because the Chinese
believe that the business of China is business."

Thanks to government investment and growing revenues from big advertisers
in China like Procter and Gamble and Coca-Cola, CCTV's own business is
booming. The network now boasts international channels in five languages
and claims a total global audience of about 125 million. In January, the
company opened 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/17/world/africa/chinas-news-media-make-inro
ads-in-africa.html?pagewanted=al> a studio in Nairobi, Kenya, and has
plans to increase the size of its overseas staff dramatically by 2016. New
production centers in Europe, Asia-Pacific, and the Middle East are
scheduled to open by the end of 2015. The eventual idea, Makori explained,
is to rely on a continuous flow of reports from outposts around the world,
"a global 24-hour news operation -- we come to America during its relevant
hours, go to Kenya, and China."

Beyond CCTV, China's news media reach now extends from mobile phones in
Nairobi to newsstands in London to the radio dial in Boston, where
WILD-AM, formerly home
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/08/china-state-television-global-
expansion> to the city's "home for classic soul and R&B," now hosts the
state-owned broadcaster China Radio International. Cut-rate prices on
syndicated articles and news footage have made Chinese outlets a popular
source for media organizations in developing nations. CCTV has also formed
partnerships with Western media organizations, inking syndication deals
with Reuters 
<http://thomsonreuters.com/content/press_room/media/2011_01_18_reuters_deli
vers_china_news>, the Associated Press
<http://www.aptn.com/aptn/website_2005/gvw.nsf/%28httpFeeds%29/1467AE2227FF
D6128025712B006201F6?OpenDocument>, and NBC
<http://www.cnbc.com/id/37889368/CNBC_Enters_into_Collaboration_with_China_
Central_Television_CCTV>.

Even as China deals with a decline in exports and a softening economy, the
global economic tumult has also given Beijing a new opening to lucrative
resource-for-development deals in Africa and Latin America, and boosted
its confidence in promoting a "China model" of development. The same holds
true in the media industry. With budgets shrinking and bureaus shutting
among major news outlets, the tumult has left room for new entrants. CCTV
America claims to have more television correspondents in Africa and Latin
America than either Al Jazeera, CNN, or the BBC, and is one of the only
major services to boast of a bureau in Havana (one October story by former
BBC correspondent Michael Voss even examined
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJnjEz1KU2s&feature=plcp> Cuba's
"democratically questionable" upcoming elections). "Global TV news
competition has only gotten stiffer over the past 10 years," says Dave
Marash, Al Jazeera English's first American anchor, and an ABC veteran.
"It's broken the mold of Western dominance of news media, and who gets to
define 'current affairs.'"

The rise of state-funded English-language television outlets from places
like France, Iran, and Russia has made the State Department anxious
<http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/03/sec-of-state-hillary-clinton-
al-jazeera-is-real-news-us-losing-information-war/>, and led a frustrated
Hillary Clinton in March of 2011 topraise
<http://world.time.com/2011/03/03/clinton-applauds-al-jazeera-rolls-eyes-at
-u-s-media> Al Jazeera for its "real news around the clock instead of a
million commercials," while lamenting the de-funding of Voice of America.
"CCTV already has a tremendous influence on Africa and certain parts of
the Middle East, too," says media scholar Ying Zhu and author of Two
Billion Eyes 
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1595584641/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1
789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1595584641&linkCode=as2&tag=fopo-20>, a
book-length investigation of the network published in October 2012. "It's
building its empire in regions where Western media are having trouble."

In 2011, two years after President Hu Jintao announced
<http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=34387>
a $7 billion plan for China to "go out" into the world, a shake-up at CCTV
landed 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/26/world/asia/cctv-chinas-largest-tv-networ
k-names-hu-zhanfan-as-head.html> Hu Zhanfan at the top of the media
empire's hierarchy. The former editor of Beijing-based intellectual
newspaper Guangming Daily <http://en.gmw.cn/>, CCTV head Hu had cautioned
journalists against placing the truth above Party loyalty, reminding
<http://news.yahoo.com/chinas-state-tv-making-huge-global-expansion-0521560
90.html> them that news must always reflect "our party and country's
political stance."

Even as reforms meant to loosen state control
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/business/global/05yuan.html> over the
media industry began in 2009, CCTV was not among the companies chosen for
reorganization. Right now, weeks away from a once-in-a-decade leadership
transition on Nov. 15, thinking outside of the box is not encouraged, said
political scientist Joseph Nye. "There are some people in the system who
clearly get it. But right now is not the time to stick their heads above
the fox hole."
While a near-monopoly on advertising in China earns
<http://www.globaltimes.cn/NEWS/tabid/99/ID/683024/CCTV-draws-record-advert
ising-revenue.aspx> CCTV over $2 billion in revenues each year, CCTV is
still funded by the government, which still exercises editorial control,
just as has since its launch, as Beijing Television, in 1958. "They've got
the mechanics down to a ‘T,'" says David Shambaugh, director of George
Washington University's China Policy Program. "But the substance is
another story. You have Western faces with unstilted English reading off
teleprompters. The key question is, what's on the teleprompter?"

* * *

For an hour each weekday at 9pm Eastern time, a program called Biz Asia
America -- anchored by Makori and Philip Yin, both veterans of Bloomberg
News -- features top national and international stories. Aside from
business and political news in Asia and the Americas, the service includes
reports from correspondents in cities across Europe and the Middle East,
delivering dispatches on stories like Spain's growing reliance
<http://english.cntv.cn/program/bizasiaamerica/20121024/104154.shtml> on
Chinese trade, Syrian refugees seeking shelter in Turkey
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWl31M_Cdi0&feature=youtu.be>, and
volunteer medical centers in Greece
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Syw28cCRreY>.

The day begins with a morning pitch meeting, where the evening's
prospective stories are discussed. Nothing is off limits, but editorial
decisions ultimately fall with Chinese news managers, led by Director
General Ma Jing, who have relocated from Beijing. (Ma Jing and all Chinese
staff contacted declined to be interviewed for this story.) "There's
vigorous debate about what stories will be covered on that day," said
Laurie. "It's a process you see in every newsroom, wherever you are. But
when there's a lack of decision, then the managing editor who's Chinese
will step in."

The roughly 10,000 people that work at CCTV around the world produce over
20 channels, from sports to entertainment to news, all intended to serve
the network's ultimate mandate: promote the values of the Communist Party.
Still, Laurie believes that CCTV's newest foreign broadcasts have arrived
at a critical juncture for China, amidst an embryonic debate about further
loosening foreign media from the restrictions that dictate domestic
broadcasts. "The people that I have learned to know since 2007," he said,
"have been bright, sometimes courageous, young journalists who, just like
journalists in Europe and America, want to do good journalism, want to
push the envelope, want to be responsible people."

"Our operation has to be guided in the end by the limits that Beijing
would allow," said Laurie, who speaks in the tidy sentences of a seasoned
television correspondent. "There's no getting around that." Still, Laurie
likes to urge skeptics to stay tuned. The idea with CCTV America, he said,
was "to do broadcasts that would be able to push the envelope in ways that
weren't possible before on China's domestic television."

Laurie's relationship with CCTV is in many ways as complex and puzzling as
the media conglomerate itself. While he began working with the company in
2007, his first encounter with CCTV was in the late 1970s, on a
black-and-white television across the border in Hong Kong. As a young
reporter for ABC News when China was still in the thrall of Mao Zedong's
Cultural Revolution, Laurie and his colleagues would gather over bottles
of beer and study CCTV's 7:00 p.m. domestic news broadcast for clues to
the current ranking of Communist officials. "We'd take a stopwatch and
measure how many seconds each leader had [on screen]," he said, referring
to a longstanding practice on CCTV of allotting screen time to officials
according to their standing in the Party. The more airtime officials
receive the more in favor they're seen to be. The young journalists would
then trek out to the border between Hong Kong and China and look longingly
across. "I remember thinking," said Laurie, "‘shit, why can't I be in
there?'"
A few years after winning a Peabody Award for his reporting for NBC in
Vietnam in 1975, Laurie landed in Beijing as one of the city's first
Western correspondents in decades. In 1989, when students began gathering
in Tiananmen Square, ABC sent Laurie, who was then chief of its Moscow
bureau, back to Beijing to cover the protests.

In the late morning hours of June 5, 1989, after witnessing soldiers shoot
at dozens of civilians as they fled for safety in and around Tiananmen
Square, Laurie and a camerawoman turned down a side street. In the crowd
they spotted a tall man in a sport coat named Xiao Bin, frantically
ranting about what he had witnessed and overheard from others. "The
bastards killed thousands!" said the man, a factory worker from the
northern city of Dalian, when they interviewed him. "Tanks ran over
people. Crushing them." While no official death tally exists, estimates of
the dead, including soldiers, now range from the hundreds to the
thousands. Laurie told his camerawoman he thought Xiao was exaggerating.
"She said, 'yes, but it's awfully good television.' I said 'you're
right,'" Laurie recounted.

As Chinese officials rushed to cover up the events of the previous night,
Laurie and his colleague managed to send their footage to Hong Kong for
transmission by satellite to ABC's studios in New York. But somehow,
someone in Beijing was watching.
"The Chinese -- and its unclear to me this day how they actually did it --
intercepted the outgoing signal," said Laurie. The unencrypted signal from
Hong Kong had been hijacked. Around the time that ABC's audiences in New
York listened to Xiao Bin's testimony, so did 200 million Chinese viewers
of CCTV, with a subtitle underneath: "This man is wanted," it read. "'He
is a rumor-monger and counter revolutionary. Please turn him in to your
nearest Security Bureau office.'"

A few days later, Xiao was turned in, and in a public hearing also
broadcast on CCTV, accused of "hooliganism" and forced to apologize for
spreading "rumors." He was sentenced to 10 years in a labor camp.

Laurie was horrified. "The Xiao Bin story is probably the most traumatic
journalistic event in my life," he said. "Very rarely in a career as a
journalist do you, in effect, send someone to prison. The story is very
complicated, and with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, you can always say
‘that could have been prevented if you had done A, B, and C.' But in the
context of the day after the Tiananmen massacre, it was almost
unavoidable, in a way."

Laurie returned to Moscow to witness the end of the Soviet Union, and in
1994 reported on South Africa's democratic transition under Nelson
Mandela, earning more plaudits along the way. But the memory of Xiao Bin
lingered. In 1997, he returned to Beijing, and learned that Xiao had been
released after five years. "He was living quietly, but I can't say
happily, back in his hometown of Dalian." Through a friend, Laurie sent a
few hundred dollars. "Once you go through the Chinese prison system, your
life is pretty messed up."

Laurie, who taught journalism at Hong Kong University from 2005 to 2011,
acknowledges the irony of his consulting for the network that once turned
his reporting against an innocent man. But, now 65, he points out,
mustering a chuckle, that the current group of CCTV America's Chinese
editors "were all four years old in 1989." And given his experience, he
sees his role as nudging the network in a more open direction, an approach
he said some elements at CCTV have tried to embrace. "There are
limitations, and they're constantly trying to find ways they can work
around those limitations. They absorb some ideas [from me], adopt some and
not adopt others."
* * *
Despite the challenges, a tough economy with dwindling prospects for
television journalists can make the attraction of a job at a place like
CCTV hard to resist. Western staff at CCTV like Laurie and Makori have
been lured by the promise of highly competitive salaries, bigger
responsibilities, and ample resources for travel and production. And it's
a chance to be on the ground floor of China's first big foray into Western
media.

"China is the emerging/emerged superpower, so it was a no-brainer for me,"
Makori explained after a taping of her show in April at the NASDAQ site in
Times Square. A few blocks away, the square's tallest billboard was
cycling through a bucolic slideshow of Chinese landscapes -- an
advertisement for Xinhua, the state-owned wire service that's another
beneficiary of Beijing's media push.

"It's like getting on the ground floor of Facebook or Google. You already
know that China's going to be a huge player," she said. "It's exciting,
it's innovative. China's obviously pegged to be one of the global leaders,
if not the global leader. So for me as a journalist to develop expertise
in China, that's not a bad career move."

Makori told me that even though Chinese editors in Washington and Beijing
vetted all stories, censorship was not an explicit policy, and said she
was surprised that her reporting on more sensitive issues, like trade
disputes, hadn't been a problem.

"Honestly, a part of me thought that these would be taboo topics, but on
the contrary, we highlight them," said Makori, in her light South African
accent. "We really try to have a balanced view of both sides, but we make
sure to also show the Chinese side of the story." Asked if there were
omissions, she said that editorial freedom was greater at CCTV than at a
previous employer, SABC, South Africa's state broadcaster. "I can tell you
that CCTV, in my experience, has not been controlling at all from an
editorial point of view, from a content point of view -- certainly not
more so than any other news channel that I've worked at."

Nina Donaghy, who left her job as a reporter at the BBC to work as the
network's Washington correspondent, insisted that her coverage was not
done "in coordination" with Beijing. "Otherwise I wouldn't be here,
frankly. With my kind of background, I wouldn't."
Censorship isn't the network's only challenge. Distribution remains a
hurdle. While CCTV already has greater reach in the United States than Al
Jazeera, finding the channel on your television can be difficult, and the
network hasn't generated much buzz among viewers or critics. Like some
other foreign broadcasters in the United States, there are no public
ratings for CCTV America. Its clunky, often poorly translated website
occasionally descends
<http://english.cntv.cn/program/newshour/20120620/108428.shtml> into
accidental comedy ("Egypt's Mubarak in comma, but 'not clinically dead'"
[sic]), and its live stream is often broken. It was only after Barbara
Dury's lobbying, she said, that CCTV agreed in June to launch its first
channel on YouTube -- a service, she noted with a chuckle, that's banned
in China.

Laurie is hoping to solve CCTV's distribution problem in the United States
by getting the channel into hotel rooms, a tactic that helped CNN gained
traction among business travelers during the 1990s. For now, the hopes of
CCTV America's journalists are pinned on emulating the success of that
upstart from Qatar. "I remember when Al Jazeera started, people called it
'the terror network,''' said Walter. "But now, years later, they're
producing really quality stuff that's being recognized. That's what I hope
for CCTV. I think it will just get better."

Still, CCTV's Western employees are taking their new jobs in stride.
Donaghy complained that the CCTV label can be an annoying liability. "You
get some comments. Running from, 'I'm sure you're paid a fortune!' to 'Do
you speak Chinese?'" When The Heat host Mike Walter, a former anchor at
the CBS affiliate in Washington, interviewed for his CCTV job, the
station's chief Ma began by reading him a newspaper report skeptical of
the new network. "The argument was, it's basically going to be a puppet
for the Chinese government, basically a propaganda instrument, and she
said, 'what do you think of that?'" recounted Walter. "I said, ‘obviously
it was a concern of mine. I don't want me working for CCTV to change the
circuitry in my brain.'"

"Personally, I think their mission is to learn as much as they can," said
Donaghy. "And to open up, and to look to the United States to see how to
run an international cable network. They're very open. It's very early
days yet."

Being on the ground floor also means the chance to do good reporting on
topics that can't offend government sensibilities -- and, perhaps, on
topics that might. "The wall is always shifting," said Walter, whose TV
anchor affability seems to belie an eagerness to probe some boundaries.
"It's always good to bump up against a wall and see how strong it is, and
whether there's some softness. I think we are going to chart new
territories."

With broader distribution, the network may have a chance to woo audiences
in Latin America and Africa, where television reporting has dwindled in
recent years. To make inroads in the United States, CCTV will continue to
focus on business stories, coupled with a greater emphasis on cultural
documentaries about Chinese history, culture, and nature -- programming
that projects a "cute" image of the country, says Ying, the media scholar.
As for its news content, "CCTV won't change until the government changes."

Marash, Al Jazeera English's first American anchor, cautioned against
writing off the network just yet. If it can manage to loose itself of
Beijing's grip, gain wider distribution, and sway audiences with marquee
interviews and exclusive coverage of the Chinese economy, for instance, it
might find a foothold on Wall Street, if not on Capitol Hill. "And it's
almost certainly going to get better."

But Walter said that pushing the envelope, even a little bit, was a
challenge for the network's newest journalists, and for the Chinese
producers who serve as a middleman with Beijing.

"You got all these Western journalists who want to push this further, and
then you work with the other side which says, ‘wait, don't push too much.'
They have to find a happy balance and operate within these confines.
That's not easy."

"American journalists have the attitude that it's better to ask
forgiveness rather than permission," added Walter. "In China, it's better
to ask permission than forgiveness. We've run headlong into that. The
approach is very different. It's something that will be a struggle here."