On today’s lecture “multi-media and reporting in America” by Dr.June Nicholson & Dr.Debora Wenger, we had been given an abstract image of the different climate of China and the U.S press. Because of the different system of these two countries, the press goes in quite different ways. And my question is “Does the press provides a balanced and fair coverage to events within and about China today?”
China is hot – it is very hot, which we can see in the internet news and the American ones. And I am not talking about the weather. Economists and historians claim that China’s economic development is unprecedented in modern history. The United States and Great Britain, both major world powers during the 20th century, took many decades to reach the level of development that China has reached in the span of only two decades.
Yet along with this rapid growth and development come many problems as well. While China has effectively become the manufacturing hub for much of the world, it has done so at the expense of industrial and manufacturing job growth in other countries. The new phenomenon of “outsourcing,” or the location of service and manufacturing jobs from the home country of a business to another country, is seen by many as threat to the health and well-being of workers in industrial nations, like the United States. These concerns appear almost daily in the press.
Now stories like these about China are not just the stuff of the daily stream of news accounts. They also represent the very foundations for the ways people think about China. The media, in other words, don’t simply report the news – they make it. For example, if the media take a particular view on an event, like the War in Iraq, such a position may become the basis for how individual citizens think about the matter.
Then, does the press provides a balanced and fair coverage to events within and about China today?
In my point of view, there may be no single image – neither a positive nor a negative one. There are variations from one paper, and one city, to another. American newspapers in different cities and different sections of the country treat China differently. As we can see on the news paper and even in the lecture given today, most American Press treats Chinese issues objectively.
In the end, of course, I believe images in the press matter, and they matter very much. People vary as do American institutions from one part of the country to the other. The best one can do is to be alert and sensitive to the images in the press and the way they help to construct our view of social realities. If we acknowledge these as facts of life in the modern world, then surely we will have gained greater insight, and, as a result I would hope, people will be motivated to dig ever more deeply into the facts of life in and about China today.