Posts Tagged ‘CCTV’

Ministry of Truth on Fire!

My deepest condolences to the family of the firefighter who died on his duty, but it's also extremely fortunate that Mandarin Oriental Hotel (owned by cctv) is not completed yet so it's likely that nobody was actually inside the building.

But no sympathy for CCTV though, it deserves this, and with little bit of guilt, I was kind of hoping that  the main building also catches the fire.

And I was amazed on how fast the social network like Twitter responded to this news. Pictures of the building on fire were already widely circulated less than half an hour after the fire, and official media were busy reporting another fire in Australia ... another prove to show that even the State thinks foreign lives are more valuable than Chinese.

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.

Facism ... and Communism

Excerpts from Obama's inauguration speech:

Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions.

Most of us should have no problem with this kind expression, but let me remind you that in Asia, there's a hyper-sensitive country with fragile feelings, which its regime still insists that communism is the only way forward

China's state television, CCTV actually broadcasted Obama's inauguration live on its news channel. If my memory serves me right, this is the first time they have done such thing, and I think CCTV should be praised for that.

However, its hyper-sensitivity eventually kicked in. The live pictures were cut moments after Obama mentioned "Communism". The relative paragraph in Obama's speech is also removed in the "full text" of the speech published on most Chinese websites.

Even as a Chinese, I have great difficulty of understanding where this hyper-sensitivity comes from. When he mentions communism, he clearly means Soviet Union. Well, we all know China is more of a capitalist country anyway. If Ministry of Truth has problem on how Obama weights communism and facism as kind of the same thing ... if you can read Chinese,have a look on how Minitrue finds an "appropriate place" for the CCP.

Despite the hyper-sensitivity thing, I think Chinese media generally did well this time. Yes they removed parts from the "full text" of the Obama's speech, but most of them were forced to do so. But look at the brighter side, Obama's remark made to the public airwave tells me that Live pictures on CCTV probably are in fact, live pictures and not delayed - now that's quite rare, especially for political events.