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Overview
In this sweeping global survey, one of Britain's most distinguished journalists and media commentators analyses for the first time the state of journalism worldwide as it enters the post-truth age.
In this sweeping global survey, one of Britain's most distinguished journalists and media commentators analyses for the first time the state of journalism worldwide as it enters the post-truth age.
From the decline of the newspaper in the West and the simultaneous threats posed by fake news and President Trump, to the part that Facebook and Twitter played in the Arab revolts and the radical openness stimulated by WikiLeaks, and from the vast political power of Rupert Murdoch's News International and the merger of television and politics in Italy, to the booming, raucous and sometimes corrupt Indian media and the growing self-confidence of African journalism, John Lloyd examines the technological shifts, the political changes and the market transformations through which journalism is currently passing.
The Power and the Story offers a fascinating insight into a trade that has claimed the right to hold power to account and the duty to make the significant interesting - while making both the first draft of history, and a profit.
'lloyd has a vivid reporting style and his many succinct interviews with victims or justifiers of Putin, or Egyptian of Indian style journalism, make his book a page-turner for those interested in question of who decides and writers the news we are permitted to read.... His masterly book is a lament not an obituary.' - Santigo Gamboa, Tribune
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781782393610 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Atlantic Books |
| Publication date: | 08/17/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 480 |
| File size: | 794 KB |
About the Author
John Lloyd co-founded the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, where he is a Senior Research Fellow. Lloyd has written several books, including What the Media Are Doing to Our Politics and Journalism in an Age of Terror. He is also a contributing editor at the Financial Times and a columnist for both Reuters.com and La Repubblica of Rome.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
'We must unwaveringly persist in ... politicians running newspapers'
For about a decade until the mid 2000s, journalism in China was, compared to past decades under Communism, relatively lightly constrained. Newspapers and even television carried out investigative journalism – most of it sanctioned, but some not. At the same time, the exploding social media told a usually youthful audience about demonstrations, strikes and elite scandals. Even the core Party papers, such as the People's Daily and People's Youth Daily, were caught up in the euphoria of openness.
Then it was, bit by bit, narrowed. Hu Jintao, president from 2003 to 2013, disliked what he saw as anarchy in the media. Unsanctioned reporting on the 2008 Sichuan earthquake (nearly 70,000 dead), some of which pointed to the shoddiness of the collapsed buildings suggesting corruption in their construction, was thought intolerable. So was the reporting of a train crash in Wenzhou in 2011: the official response to the crash had been to do a hasty rescue, then literally to bury the derailed carriages. Even Party papers had ignored the call for their reporting to run the official line 'great love in the face of great disaster'. Journalism was getting too uppity.
In August 2013, the leader of 1.36 billion people and of eighty-eight million communists, Party leader and president delivered a speech to the National Propaganda and Ideology Work Conference, convened in Beijing, designed to remind the Party and the people that journalism's priorities and tropes were far too important to be decided on by journalists.
Change, Xi noted, was as rapid and large in propaganda and ideology as in every other sphere of his country's fevered progress, but at root, its fundamental task had not changed – 'and cannot change' (my italics). Its central effort must remain directed to the consolidation of 'the guiding spirit of Marxism', and 'a common ideological basis for the united struggle of the entire Party and the entire people'.
Workers in propaganda and ideology – that is, in the media – had become lax, even somewhat treacherous: 'they speak without restraint, they are completely unscrupulous, they are cheered on by hostile forces'. No one should think, he said, that there exists some realm, which could call itself 'independent', or 'objective', above politics, even above national interest. 'Western countries flaunt "press freedom", but in fact, they also have ideological baselines, they are under the control of interest groups and the inclinations of political parties, there are no completely independent media': in principle a correct, if highly limited, observation – but one which neglected to say that independence from the state and the ruling group was the indispensable 'baseline' for a journalism which could claim autonomy and rights.
The media had become celebrity obsessed, he argued. TV channels and magazines 'seek novelty, pursue pretty women, chase them like ducks!' Attacks on socialism, on the nation, rumours and lies must have no space on any medium – not on 'newspapers, periodicals and magazines, platforms and forums, meetings and conferences, films, television and radio stations, theatres ... digital newspapers, mobile television, mobile media, mobile text messaging, WeChat, Weibo, blogs, microblogs, forums and other such new media' – a list so comprehensive it seemed Xi was afraid of not listing one in case it was seized on as a permitted deviation.
The Net was a particular threat – for 'Western anti-China forces continue to vainly attempt to use the Internet to "topple China"'. Xi was again on the right track. Bill Clinton, in August 2000, asked his audience to 'imagine how much [the Net] could change China ... [the Beijing regime] has been trying to crack down on the Internet – good luck. That's sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.' In 2010, when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State, she said that 'countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of Internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century'. Xi did want to nail Jell-O (a gelatin-based dessert) to the wall, and had already partly succeeded when he gave the speech.
One phrase in his speech was particularly telling. Xi said that 'we must unwaveringly persist in the principle that the Party manages the media, persist in politicians running newspapers [my italics], periodicals, TV stations and news websites'. 'Politicians running newspapers' is a Maoist phrase, and a vitally important one.
In February 1957, Mao's report to a Party Congress included a reflection on the Soviet invasion of Hungary the previous year. People's Daily, the Party paper, covered this conference with a banner photograph and a news story of several hundred words. The paper published nothing more on the report.
After some weeks, Mao summoned all the members of People's Daily's editorial board to his office in the government enclave of Zhongnanhai. He charged them with being aloof and indifferent, and claimed the paper was run by 'scholars and dead persons'. Editor Deng Tuo – who had, in 1944, compiled the first edition of the Selected Works of Mao Zedong – was demoted to Secretary of Culture and Education for the Beijing Municipal Party Committee. In May 1966, People's Daily published a series of articles charging Deng as an anti-party, anti-socialist, reactionary gang member. He committed suicide.
In 1959, Mao repeated his orders to Wu Lengxi, Deng's successor: the paper should not be run by intellectuals, dead or alive, but by politicians. Wu tried his best to follow Mao's advice, but was fired in May 1966. On 1 June 1966, the paper published an editorial with the title 'Sweep Away All Monsters and Demons'.
In later writing, Mao made clearer his view: 'Some people are intellectuals, and their greatest weakness is that they are devoid of decisions yet full of ... pointless ideas. The key points should be grasped at once ... Newspapers must be run by politicians.' It was this which Xi invoked.
This time, People's Daily got it. In October 2013, the Party's flagship paper eagerly parsed the speech, writing that 'it clarified the basis, preconditions, methods and objectives for us to better persist in politicians running the media in the new period and under new technological conditions' – which meant that the 'bigger picture of reform, development and stability' would take precedence over the mere phenomena of news.
Xi had interpreted the situation facing the Party as dangerous. Corruption was rampant, inequalities in wealth had grown more rapidly than the economy and with it arrogance born of a sense of entitlement, recently acquired. In October 2010, Li Qiming, the son of a senior police officer in Baoding in the Hebei province, drunk and driving his girlfriend back to her dormitory in Hebei University, knocked over two students, one of whom died.
When security guards detained him, he shouted, 'Sue me if you dare, my father is Li Gang!' The phrase went China-wide, was set to music and was trotted out as a joke, and a warning. The authorities prevaricated – but some months after the incident, Li Qiming was arrested and sentenced to six years' imprisonment and a fine of nearly 70,000 dollars. Xi said he wanted to change the culture which produced that behaviour, but he also wanted to suppress the media which reported it.
In the China of the 2010s, stability was difficult to maintain, as commercialism, corruption and great disparities of wealth (with the emergence of a widely disliked and arrogant class of wealthy families) embedded themselves into a social structure, which, a mere two decades before, had been much more egalitarian and statist. Evan Osnos wrote that Xi Jinping was repelled 'by the all-encompassing commercialization of Chinese society, with its attendant nouveaux riches, official corruption, loss of values, dignity and self-respect, and such "moral evils" as drugs and prostitution'. David Shambaugh, an influential US scholar and China watcher, characterized the path Xi had chosen as one of 'hard authoritarianism', which, if continued, is likely to have the result that 'economic development will stagnate and even stall, exacerbating already acute social problems and producing the protracted political decline of the ruling Chinese Communist Party'. His harder line most constrains journalists and civil society activists in the more liberal regions of the country – in the south, and along the eastern seaboard, such as the cities of Shanghai and Beijing (Hong Kong is a special case) and provinces such as Guangdong and Jiangsu – where journalists have worked most freely. These are also the richer parts of China.
Osnos comments that the drive had a separate, perhaps more important aim beyond punishing corruption, since it was 'also a proven instrument for political consolidation, and at the highest level Xi has deployed it largely against his opponents'. As the campaign proceeds, stability remains the central value – of the society, but also of the leadership. It is hostile to experiments with democracy, and to a freer press. The prominent commentator Eric X. Li believes that Xi's coming to power in 2012 'might one day be seen as marking the end of the idea that electoral democracy is the only legitimate and effective system of political governance'. Unlike the system in the US, the Chinese form of rule is dedicated to producing the most skilled administrators: 'a person with Barack Obama's pre-presidential professional experience would not even be the manager of a small county in China's system'.
In February 2016, Xi tightened the ropes further. On the nineteenth of that month, he told a gathering of officials who dealt with the media that 'All news media run by the Party must work to speak for the Party's will and its propositions, and protect the Party's authority and unity.' On the same day, a well-known property entrepreneur, Ren Zhiqiang, was attacked on the Beijing's Party committee website for having 'lost his party spirit' and 'opposing the party' when he wrote on his microblog, in reaction to Xi's announcement, that the media should serve the people not the Party; his posts were deleted. David Bandurski, the editor of the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong, wrote: 'I think the sense is, "We own you, we run you, we tell you how things work. The party is the centre, and you serve our agenda".'
Xi's vision is that journalism should learn again its place – not as servile as in Mao's day, but certainly not in pursuit of the powers of revelation and criticism for which it was grasping in the 1990s and 2000s. At the same time, his rule does not appear to be unpopular. Tough on corruption, he is also tough on what he defines as China's interests beyond its borders and shores – especially in the South China Sea. When, in July of 2016, the UN's Law of the Sea Tribunal in The Hague found China guilty of illegal acts in that region, the media were instructed to ignore the finding, or to represent it as part of a US-inspired attack on China. And ordinary Chinese, deprived of any alternative narrative about other countries' claims, seemed happy to go along with the Party's stance, posting aggressive threats, some of which called for war against the US.
In the years since Xi's assumption of power, he has taken under his control the Party leadership, the state leadership and – through chairmanship of the Central Military Commission – leadership of the armed forces, as well as of several key committees. The power he has accumulated derives its mandate from his leadership of the Communist Party, which in turn rests on the success with which it has, since the 1980s, presided over a steadily rising standard of living, the maintenance of peace and national unity and an ever-more widely recognized position as a major world power. Wise one-party rule has brought success, and Xi is adamant that Western-style democracy cannot be tolerated.
China's leader came to the view that Western democracy is failing, and with it, its hysterical media; at the same time, he also seems to believe that the Chinese media, especially the Net and social media, infected by Western viruses, are straws waiting for a spark. He has a sophisticated and subtle apparatus for putting out threatened fires, which concentrates on narrowing the political space open to the over-indulged media of the two years before his assumption of power, while retaining and expanding, as far as possible, consumer choice and Party-sanctioned entertainment.
'Youwei' (a pseudonym) writes that 'people smart enough to avoid politics entirely will not even feel it ... but it has reduced the chances of any mature civil society developing in contemporary China, let alone a political one'. China's new generation of journalists had seen themselves as developing civil society, and thus were knocked back, hard.
The easing of Party control in the 1980s led to a more negotiable relationship with political and ideological dictates and had given the trade a taste of what it was to make independent journalistic judgements. Editors now had leverage over the Party, of which they would be members, for in order to fulfil their commercial task, they had to interpret the political line more loosely. They now had two masters – the Party (which kept at least 51 per cent of the ownership of media outlets) and the market – and many editors and producers became adept at playing the first off against the second, within limits which the Party controlled.
The number of newspapers, magazines and TV channels, swollen with advertising, grew rapidly. The new journalists, magazine writers, editors and producers were often born in Mao's time, but were young during the last great deadly spasm, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (Mao ended it in 1969, seven years before his death, years after the death of many millions from its effects). They found their professional feet in the rapid liberalization of the eighties – liberalization that allowed, even encouraged, new forms of writing and broadcasting explicitly designed to attract larger and more satisfied audiences. Many in this new audience liked revelatory journalism, since they knew of the system's defects and lies but had never seen them publicly examined.
Entertainment was, of course, more popular. Entertainment in the form of blockbuster films, soap operas, detective series, situation comedies, game shows and celebrity programmes were developed, copied from Hong Kong, Taiwan and the West, which quite soon equalled or surpassed the models in imagination and enthusiasm – the celebrity obsession that Xi grumbled about in his speech on propaganda could be as fevered as anywhere in the West. As his complaint showed, he had Victorian values: under his rule, the deeply unpopular State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television – a censorship body – deepened its reputation as 'a group of joyless, humourless government minders standing between Chinese citizens and the prospect of better movies and television'.
The new freedoms made semi-dissident figures popular. One such was Han Han, born, in 1982, a few years after the Mao era ended, with a novel published when still an adolescent, which excoriated tedious, learn-by-rote school education. He was disapproved of by elders, but 'his visibility reflected how much wider the realm of Chinese intellectual life had become over the past decade. For every writer still barred from travelling abroad, and every novel prevented from publication, another popped up unmolested in a third- or fourth-tier city that was once a cultural desert.' His blog attracted an audience of many millions; he continued to turn out novels and became an 'ambassador' for the smartphone company OnePlus. He developed a line in criticism of the authorities which put him on the side of greater democratic freedoms, while never quite embracing a wholesale democratic revolution, and sometimes appearing to pooh-pooh its possibility. In regretful mode, he wrote, 'In China, influence belongs only to those with power ... They own the theatre, and they can always bring down the curtain, turn off the lights, close the door, and turn the dogs loose.'
* * *
In democratic societies, journalists often have close ties with civil rights organizations and lawyers, free-speech institutes and NGOs that major on issues like inequality. It's mutually advantageous (if often mildly corrupting), since journalists want the kind of survey and policy information these organizations have, and they in turn want publicity. In China, the Party often judges such links as extremely dangerous, and has moved still more strongly against those involved in legal and civil rights, rather than against the journalists.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Power and the Story"
by .
Copyright © 2017 John Lloyd.
Excerpted by permission of Atlantic Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Preface,
Acknowledgements,
Part I THE AUTHORITY OF THE STATE,
Introduction: 'I hate your scary truth',
1 'We must unwaveringly persist in ... politicians running newspapers',
2 'Egyptians will not again tolerate dictatorship',
3 'You saw it on television? That means they are lying!',
4 Three degrees of despotism,
i The New Thing,
ii 'I am having it cut off right away, sir!',
iii 'We can't criticize our own',
Part II THE AUTHORITY OF THE MARKET,
Introduction: 'Without reliability, one cannot be a journalist',
5 'We are in the advertising business',
6 'We need a prime minister, not a Trappist monk',
7 'Some of the stories ... were more or less true',
8 In the market, but free?,
i 'The most important story ... is the one that cannot be covered',
ii 'We did not grasp what was happening',
iii 'In East Asia ... journalists are part of the power structure',
iv 'When journalists come to Israel they leave behind their professional tools',
9 'There is no model for newspapers',
10 'We've got the ability to go directly ... to the people',
Part III FREEDOM,
Introduction: 'Journalism's first obligation is to the truth',
11 Roads to freedom,
i 'Your work has always been essential',
ii 'The BBC ... has a liberal bias',
iii 'Nous sommes un journal',
iv 'The Internet is a threat to human civilization',
Conclusion: This happened,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,