Let the words of the Big Brother spread
Chinese Media yesterday reported that China is planning to invest 45 billion yuan to raise it's "International images" through foreign broadcasting, possibly to open a "CNN" style news channel.
I always believe that to domestic market, CC's CCTV (lots of CCs, if you can guess what the first two Cs stand for:)) strongly reassembles a lot of characteristics of the telescreen. Xinwen Lianbo would be an obvious example, every night at 7, if you want to watch TV, that's pretty much the only thing available as it is simulcasted in every major Chinese TV channel.
So will this new channel become an International Edition of the telescreen? I don't know, aren't we already got CCTV 9?
I tried to watch CCTV 9 a while but it's just got too boring eventually, BBC WORLD offers a much wider perspective, more up to date news. What CCTV 9 really amused me is that, no matter what kind of news programme you are watching (like "Asia Today", "World Wide Watch", or "BizChina"); no matter what happened to the World, the headline almost always stay the same, usually involving a high ranking government official or communist party boss meet foreign visitors, or their words on various issues.
Clearly, to be a respected and trusted world new channel, you must got both global perspective and an editorial independence. Global perspective ... can be possible but I don't expect it from CCTV, but editorial independence? I guess we got another hundred year to wait.
