China in the media, 14
The problems of China coverage indicated below are not intended to dismiss the exercise entirely. Rather they are intended to point out some weaknesses within the media's coverage of China. Only with these weaknesses in the open can journalists and editors address them, and consumers take them into account when encountering China coverage.
We have seen that China coverage often lacks nuance. It does not provide important cultural context. Rather it unnecessarily frames some story elements as foreign and indeed sometimes beyond comprehension - remember the inexplicable red sashes. China is considered a monolithic entity, where the government can and do whatever it pleases. Furthermore outside of a few minority peoples, the government is often considered the genuine voice of the people. A sense of threat - especially economic - pervades China coverage. It is characterized as a competitor, an international other who is in the process of overhauling the international system.
The media engages in a national discourse when covering China. By covering China as it does it places Canada within a certain international framework, and thereby contributes to public international perceptions. These perceptions are clouded by propaganda, censorship, and an uneven flow of news. Ed Harriman said it well when he argued that: "if journalists and editors wrote about them [international incidents] in more down-to-earth terms and dropped their cliches and - all too often - their clapped out Cold War rhetoric [in our case the globalization rhetoric], then people who depend on newspapers and television for their news would be a lot less confused, a lot less intimidated by the rest of the world, and a lot better informed."ยน One can only hope that Canada's China coverage will mature and internalize some of this advice.
1 Ed Harriman, Hack: Home Truths About Foreign News, (London: Zed Books, 1987), p. 1.