Joan Maltese
Special for NewsMax.com
Thursday, July 10, 2003

When I talk to journalists from other organizations in Beijing or read Western coverage of events in China, my heart beats a little faster. I can feel the development of a concept, the shaping of a story, the pursuit of numbers, witnesses and facts, the thrilling fear of violating journalistic principles.

None of this is discernible in our work, and I contemplate the demoralizing flip side of this, that our listeners don’t expect it.

I know that academics, journalists, even people who write computer manuals, painstakingly adhere to certain standards although they often write in the knowledge that their readership is extremely small. This is because they also write in the knowledge that their readers get unhappy when they’re misled.

We at CCTV-9 have to rely on other things, such as self-respect and friendly feelings for our colleagues, for such inspiration, rather than a sense of duty to an information-hungry audience. With our history of disappointing them, they disappoint us right back.

We lead a broadcast with a Xinhua item stating that 2,500 people have died as a result of the Falun Gong’s influence. The writer makes a mistake; it’s read on the air as 25,000. I’m the only one to notice, because it happens I read the same item that morning in the China Daily. We strike out a zero for the next broadcast and never hear from the audience or management.

We report on an 8 a.m. broadcast that China will definitely launch a manned space mission in 2003. On the noon broadcast, “the launch date is still uncertain,” and the writer tells me it could be years away. Once again, writers of the source material at Xinhua or CCTV-1 are unavailable or irresponsible and there’s no one in our newsroom who knows or cares enough to pick up a phone for clarification. We don’t strive for it either; just change the story according to the latest copy and trust that no one expects any better.

All this is pretty rough on your sense of mission, and at some point most Foreign Experts fall through loopholes of resignation. We’re supposed to be linguistic guardians at the gate, and despite the non-supportive hiring and training practices, I for one still do my best with the sow’s ears that Chinese writers bring me for copyediting.

“A self-penned campus drama decided to overthrow the operational stereotype and joined the market competition in Nanjing,” writes a culture reporter who did not attend the event. “Romeo or Orthello ... features campus-wide famous master and phd actors plus the charm of British literature heavyweight William Shakespeare, from whose books the play was adapted from.” I do my honest best to make this writer look good. But when the mismanagement undoes such efforts, I ease off my toes.

Thanks to the undefined areas of responsibility, overzealous censors sometimes decide they’re also language experts. A Foreign Expert composes the headline, “Scholars from east and west find common ground in their differing views of human rights at a symposium in Beijing.” The censor changes it: “The international human rights symposium held in Beijing closes with academics agreeing that both western and oriental countries shouldn’t impose its own values on others.” I let it stand.

A Foreign Expert composes the super, “China restates its anger over so-called defense summit.” The censor changes it: “China angers over US official meeting with Taiwan’s Tan Yiau-ming.” I don’t say a word.

While there are no consequences for misreporting deaths by a factor of 10 or changing the timeline on China’s next great scientific feat, there are a few things that keep us alert. One Foreign Expert came a hair’s breadth from getting fired for an item he had polished that counted Taiwan among the “countries”—not “countries and regions”—participating in an economic conference. Taiwan is “Taiwan province” or “Taiwan island.” Chen Shui-bian is Taiwan’s “so-called president.” The Falun Gong is “the evil Falun Gong cult,” which I always wonder how anchors manage to get out with a straight face. Mainland China is “the Chinese mainland” for some reason, and Chinese dissidents are “so-called dissidents.”

Nepal’s Maoist rebels are simply “rebels.” I wondered aloud once if our viewers didn’t question the odd causelessness of these “rebels,” whose acts have so far killed some 7,200 people including a massacre in June 2001 that left nine members of the Nepalese royal family dead. Wouldn’t you think they’d have an identifiable motive, I asked? “Because it’s Monday,” suggested a fellow Foreign Expert.

We also cherish the word “further,” meant to show that substantial progress has already been made. “With its WTO membership, China has further opened up its legal service.” “The new legal articles will further push forward the nation’s human rights policy.” “We maintained the steady, fast and healthy development of the national economy and promoted the all-round progress of the Chinese society and further improvement of people’s life.”

Low-Tech Propaganda Machine

Some people expect CCTV-9 to be an oasis of state-of-the-art technology, being an agency of a government that reserves numerous privileges for itself. But it is after all one of China’s creaky state-owned enterprises, and besides, how high-tech does a propaganda factory have to be? There are only two Internet terminals in the newsroom, both subject to state blockage of the Web sites of BBC, Voice of America, the U.S. Department of Defense, Time Magazine and all geocities sites, among others.

The software we use to edit and manage stories is buggy, outdated, and barely maintained. Neither of the doors on the two sound booths has a complete knob. The tech support engineers, the sound editors and the video editors don’t speak English. We never do visual effects, and the sound editing equipment is generations old.

There was once a more advanced sound system, but the only person who ever bothered to learn it has long since departed for a career in movie production. IT support is so bare that there isn’t even an e-mail service for the cctv-9 domain. The most upper-level employees have business cards that read “John Lee, Executive Producer, jlee@hotmail.com.”

If the technology at CCTV-9 is primitive, the physical environment is even more so. So undeveloped is China’s janitorial industry that it was the subject of a China Daily editorial during the first week of 2003. Much of Beijing, including the CCTV-9 news offices, is cleaned by underpaid, untrained minions armed with black mops and fuzzy rags. Even the inveterate slobs on the staff can barely stand to touch a surface in the newsroom. The window ledges are thick with brown, crumbly dirt. The air conditioning vents are bent and rusty. The walls are smeared with shoe marks, spilled drinks and handprints. Tiles on the floor are loose and broken. Keyboards are grimy, monitors are dotted with fingerprints, vents on CPUs are furry, tabletops are crusty.

Peer down between the work tables and you’ll see a hazardous gutter of sticky wires, discarded papers, dropped chopsticks, candy wrappers, newspapers, a one-yuan note (yay!), any kind of garbage you can imagine. Junk dating back years is piled in dusty towers or hidden under desks, never touched and never thrown away. On summer afternoons and evenings, the stench of urine from the men’s room floats out into the hallway and penetrates the neighboring offices.

All this is reportedly due to change. Thanks to an article in Newsweek, not to any internal communication, I have learned that CCTV will have a lavish new headquarters in 2008 designed by Jan Koolhaas, that its 12 channels will be expanded to 200 and that it will develop more of its own content.

I spoke with a Chinese staffer about these developments, and the talk strayed to a new business show we recently launched. We both wondered where we’d get the talent to compete with the Asia business reports on CNN and BBC.

The trouble is, I said, CCTV-9 alienates its talent. I named the business writer who left under such a cloud as a case in point, and the staffer got exasperated, railing that you don’t have to stick to your principles, that people who compromise do just fine, that I certainly didn’t have to believe everything that business reporter said.

I’ll be long gone from CCTV-9 by 2008, when the world’s journalists will flood in to cover Beijing’s Olympics and bask in CCTV’s by-then fabulous facilities, but I cringe even now at the irony, the waste. Do I want a bigger, shinier CCTV? Would I want a bigger, shinier Politburo?

From CNN to Censor

I keep finding myself in a dead end with these puzzles. Educated young Chinese in the newsroom tell me the Tiananmen Square massacre was an attack on the People’s Liberation Army by vicious students, and I dismiss them as peasants. I look for better journalistic practices in a Chinese writer freshly returned from a coveted CNN training junket, only to find that she’s been promoted to censor. I help my co-workers write applications to journalism schools at American universities, and I politely refrain from asking them what they intend to do with such an education when they get back.

I turn away with embarrassment from the work of another competent, up-and-coming field reporter who is trifling away on assignments about sports, the growing popularity of the Communist Party among China’s youth, and the 100 percent safety record of the Long March rocket. (It’s the engine that’s safe, he clarifies for me – and the rocket has never failed when launching China’s Shenzhou spacecraft, only when launching other countries’ stuff, such as the time it blew up with an American-made satellite on it and killed more than 100 Chinese villagers.)

I am an escapee from Silicon Valley, a technical writer who took off for a little adventure around the time of the dot-com bust and made a lucky connection in Beijing. I haven’t had a formal education in journalism. I haven’t had the rigorous classroom discussions that I imagine take place about governments that control the flow of information, and perhaps I haven’t thought as deeply as others about the crucial importance of people’s freedom to pursue the truth. So my compulsion to expose it all feels more nasty than noble.

My sickness with the whole scene must indicate some immense hopelessness or unspoken something among my Chinese colleagues. But I can’t see what’s behind their shrugging acceptance of their own passivity, their reluctance to batter down doors increasingly splintered and rotten that would admit the light of knowledge, their readiness to save China’s face by covering it with clown makeup.

All I have for certain is some imperative to record my experiences faithfully. All I can do is to try to be, right here and for now, CCTV-9’s very best journalist.

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