Can CCTV-9 be saved? - the WTO column


Traditional media worldwide are under attack as they lose their audiences, their revenue and their appeal. While the internet is very far away from being an alternative of even a real challenge for those traditional media, even the most renowned international media are doing their best to jeopardize the position they used to have. Watching TV in the US is an activity more and more people are giving up.

CCTV-9 I had given up already years ago. When my internet connection ended up in another room than my TV-set I had to make a choice between CCTV-9 and the internet. Very seldom CCTV-9 won that contest. When traveling outside China, I did not have the feeling I was really missing anything.
Now I got set up again and thanks to my recently installed wireless connection I can combine surfing the internet and watching TV. I saw some changes on CCTV, but not enough to attract my attention.
The program Dialogue used to be one of my favorites, but the quality seems to be a problem. Very often the questions asked are much better than the answers they generate, and as a journalist I find that an awkward position to been in. You get the feeling you’re interviewing the wrong guests. So, dialogue very seldom ends in what I would like, in a debate, since the guests, how good or how bad they are, always agree.

I saw CCTV-9 hired a foreign anchorman with an Australian accent, but unfortunately, what he says had not changed. Anchorpersons only very seldom decide what they are going to say, so letting an Australian face asking the same boring questions is not really going to help anybody. Having an ugly foreign man as an anchorperson at least does not distract you from what he is saying, as happened initially to me as I discovered the absolutely gorgeous lady that brings us the daily updates from the stock markets.
I was so impressed by her looks that it took me a few times before I realized I had no clue what she was saying. One evening I turn the screen black and tried so listen. Now, I’m not a stock market expert like most Chinese are, but I guess that those experts do have other media to get their need for jargon satisfied when they come home in the evening. Earlier in the week she told us that the private company D’Long from Xinjiang was in heavy weather, but I had to turn to the Internet to find out what was really going on.

What I enjoyed initially very much was the documentary on China’s space program. Here were the Chinese academics, prosecuted during the Cultural Revolution, shocked by some of their own failures, and of course very pleased their successes. And they talked about it, told us about their emotions, also about their mistakes, about their position in society, on what they like and what they feared. What I missed, as the international cooperation came into the picture, were the interviews with their foreign partners. How much better this documentary would have been when the American would have talked about their impressions. Really talking to foreigners seems still too far away, as the absolutely hilarious uninformative interviews with foreign CEO’s show.
Friends told me later that the documentary by now has been repeated so often on TV, they can repeat pieces verbatim.

The past few days I did not even switch on the TV anymore. Traditional media are losing the struggle for their audiences in China too, and we can only blame them for it.

Fons Tuinstra