MCLC: Daniel Bell makes waves for praising China (1)

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Anne Henochowicz <annemh at alumni.upenn.edu>
Subject: Daniel Bell makes waves for praising China (1)
***********************************************************

Below, find Daniel Bell's response to the Globe and Mail article posted
yesterday on the list. Also, the Chinese Media Project takes a
closer look at the particular claims Bell is making about the Chinese
Media here:

http://cmp.hku.hk/2012/11/28/29501/

Anne

===========================================================

Source: The Huffington Post (11/25/12):
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-a-bell/freedom-over-truth_b_2188739.ht
ml

Freedom Over Truth?
By Daniel Bell

Posted: 11/25/2012 4:05 pm
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/daniel-a-bell/freedom-over-truth_b_2188739.h
tml?view=print&comm_ref=false>

Western societies rightly take pride in commitment to freedom of the
press. In China, journalists are subject to tight political controls and I
look forward to the day that Chinese journalists can report freely on
political controversies. To my mind, a free press is an essential means
for dealing with political corruption and exposing mistaken or immoral
governmental policies.

However, there are some advantages to the Chinese way of reporting news.
When Chinese journalists interview their subjects, they try to put forward
a balanced account of what the interviewees have to say, with emphasis on
what can be learned and communicated as something new and interesting.
They rarely engage in muckraking, public character assassination, or put
on a smiling face then betray their interviewees in print.

Another advantage is that Chinese journalists often discuss the choice of
headlines with the writers. The aim is to come up with a headline that
best reflects the general theme of the article. In the Western press, by
contrast, the aim is often to come up with provocative headlines that
catch the attention of the reader. The only bad headline, I'm told, is a
boring headline. Subjects of interviews, or writers of op-ed comments, are
almost never consulted about the choice of headlines. Many readers blame
the authors or the interviewees for the headlines because they do not know
that headlines are not chosen by them.

Most important, perhaps, Chinese journalists usually send drafts of their
articles before they are published to check for factually incorrect
information. Reporters tend to check facts before the publish them. I've
given several interviews with the Chinese media, and they usually send me
drafts of what they write so as to catch and correct errors of fact. Of
course, I do not comment on critical points put forward by journalists who
hold different moral and political values.

I've also given some interviews with the Western media, and the
journalists almost never send drafts of their articles before they are
published. I understand the worry that journalists think preserving a
distance from the subjects they cover is a way of allowing for more
critical coverage. But there is a risk that false information will be
published in a way that's very damaging to the subjects discussed in the
articles.

Mark MacKinnon's recent article in the Globe and Mail is a case study of
what can go wrong with the "Western" approach to media interviews. The
lengthy article, titled "A Canadian iconoclast praises China's one-party
system 
<http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/canadian-iconoclast-daniel-a-bel
l-praises-chinas-one-party-system-as-a-meritocracy/article5633364/>,"
makes me out to be an apologist for the political status quo in China who
is blinded by class interest.

In fact, I defend a model of political rule -- meritocracy on top,
democracy on the bottom, with room for experimentation in between -- that
I hold as a standard for evaluating political progress (and regress) in
China. I have repeatedly used this model to criticize China's political
problems.

The article is full of factual mistakes and misleading innuendos, and the
reader is led to believe I'm a paid political hack for the Chinese
Communist Party. MacKinnon does mention I'm (part) owner of a restaurant
owner in Beijing, but he doesn't mention that I'm the author and editor of
many academic books on East Asian politics and philosophy published by
leading university presses such as Princeton University Press and
Cambridge University Press.

I understand that selection of information needs to be made, especially in
an article that does not aim for balance. But factual mistakes that have
the aim of undermining the reputation of the person being interviewed are
inexcusable. Let me note some examples.

MacKinnon writes: "Tsinghua later told the official People's Daily that
Prof. Bell was hired because he understood China better than other foreign
academics." This point implies I was hired because of my political views
rather than my academic credentials. In fact, MacKinnon refers to an
article that was picked up by an English website of the People's Daily.
The article itself was published in the China Youth Daily and here's what
my head of department said: "Bell was hired, Wan said, in part because of
his "compassion and understanding of Chinese culture and education." Note
that MacKinnon leaves out the words "in part." When I was hired by
Tsinghua over eight years ago, I had not written anything about Chinese
politics, and I hope I'm not so too self-deluded if to think I was hired
at least partly because of my academic contributions.

Rather than mention any arguments developed in my books, MacKinnon chose
to report some views on the internet implying that I write what I write
because I'm an agent for the Chinese government: "Some Chinese Internet
users, meanwhile, noted Prof. Bell used some of the same arguments and
terminology as state media, raising suspicions that his ideas weren't
entirely his own."

No evidence is supplied. For the record, I have never collaborated with
government officials for the purpose of writing articles.

To be honest, I can live with all these mistakes and misleading innuendos.
It won't be the first time interviewees have been victimized by muckraking
journalists. What really hurts me, however, is that MacKinnon chose to
implicate my wife (he has not met her). Before the article was published,
I had forwarded an email from my wife asking that her name be left out of
the article, but he chose to ignore that email.

MacKinnon writes that "Prof. Bell's well-kept house as well as his
background suggest his family is of the class he thinks should rule
China." The implication is that I defend rule by the rich because it's in
my class interest to do so. In fact, I do not think that rich people
should rule China. An important advantage of a well-functioning political
meritocracy is that it allows for upward (and downward) mobility based on
ability and morality, not class background.

But to press his vulgar Marxist argument, MacKinnon writes: "He met his
wife, Song Bing, at Oxford University in 1989, a time when only top
students with impeccable Communist credentials were allowed to leave China
to study." In fact, my wife is not a party member, and she left China in
1988 because she was awarded a merit-based scholarship by the Hong Kong
based Swire Corporation. At the time, my wife was an undergraduate at
Peking University's law faculy, and she was admitted to that university as
a result of having scored highly on the national university examinations
in her home province of Hunan. Perhaps MacKinnon was led to think that
"impeccable Communist credentials" played a role in helping my wife go
abroad because my wife's 86 year old father was a local level communist
cadre. Such "guilt by family association" was typical in the Cultural
Revolution and maybe MacKinnon chose to borrow tactics from those days. In
fact, the connection exists only in MacKinnon's mind. Again, he could have
checked this information, but he chose not to.

Why does any of this matter? OK, I confess, I'm glad to have this kind of
blog forum so that I can defend myself and my family against character
assassination. But I'd also like to press a more important point.
Newspapers are in trouble now and most have not yet found a viable model
to compete against free news on the internet. The best case for newspapers
is that they exercise a kind of quality control that is lacking on the
free-wheeling internet: the articles are more well-researched, more
analytical, more balanced, more thoughtful. In short, they do a better job
of furthering the truth compared to opinionated nonsense on the internet.
But it's hard to defend newspapers if journalists only care about the
freedom to write what they want to write, similar to what people do online.

So, yes, let's defend freedom of the press, in the West and in China. But
let's not forget that truth matters too.

Update: The online version of MacKinnon's article has been revised. The
headline was revised to make it less sensationalist (or perhaps "Canadian
iconoclast" sounded too much like an oxymoron?). I sent a list of five
mistakes to the Globe asking for corrections and an apology. There was no
apology, but they acted on four of the mistakes: they deleted two factual
mistakes from the online version of the article (but without noting that
the lines had been deleted; the Globe has a policy of not repeating
inaccurate information on the grounds that this perpetuates the
inaccuracy), added a correct line about my wife's background (and added a
note), and published (or will soon publish) a letter of mine stating two
inaccuracies along with my response. Ideally, of course, a quality paper
would do more fact-checking before the article is published, but overall
I'm impressed with the professional and courteous way the Globe has dealt
with the aftermath of the article.