media – The third evil force

ESWN offers again a rather unusual insight in how the Chinese traditional media still work. In a translation from the New Century Net, Liang Zhi describes his viewpoint on the way the “third evil force” works, a term people often use to describe the media.
“The first evil force refers to government organizations. They abuse their power over the people. The second evil force refers to the triad organizations on mainland China. To list the news media alongside the triad gangs is quite appropriate. I was a reporter for about seven to eight years at a newspaper in western China, and I can summarize what I personally observed as follows: a fucking gangster newspaper!”
What makes the emotional account interesting is the large number of little facts, on what media cannot report (“When the stock market began to fall successively last year, several companies requested to be suspended from trading. These could not be reported because of the fear of causing stock market turmoil”) or what they should report, often hundreds of instructions from different departments.
As ESWN notes, not all crows under heaven are black. As the Guangdong media had to change to beat off the competition from Hong Kong, the rest of the media will be facing the competition by the internet. When traditional media cannot match the information the internet is offering, they will see their position erode even faster than the traditional US media are undermined by the internet.