No more heroes anymore – the WTO column

(Later also at Chinabiz and BNN)
One of the problems when news or debates crosses cultural divides is that on different parts of the divide people had to deal with different information. I still remember the shocked messages I got in the 1990s from the US when a Chinese citizens arrived there after serving a very long time in a Chinese prison.
Apart from the freedom hero he was in the Western media, he emerged than also a racist, an anti-feminist and – that really got him in into trouble in the US – a chain-smoker who saw smoking as his ultimate human right. His problems were mentioned in a rather subdue way: the media did not want to kill their longtime hero.
Both Western and Chinese media sanitize their stories, so they become easy to digest for their different audiences. But that tradition of cleaning up stories for domestic consumption shows severe signs of metal fatigue now we can actually know more about people than the traditionally media in the past would allow us to know thanks to the internet.

Two media professors from the better Chinese universities, both depicted as promoters of free speech, have a less than straight forward record on media politics than Western media made us believe, and in the past few weeks simmering discontent with both professors emerged..
Thanks to CNN and a few other mainstream media professor Li Xiguang of Tsinghua University emerged during the SARS crisis in 2003 as a believer in free speech. On the internet, the approach was more critical: "During the SARS period, CNN interviewed him and asked him about why China imposed a national blackout on information,” writes a blogger. “He bluntly pointed out that there was no need for the government to do so and that the media should be allowed to collect and publish news. Then he turned around and told the Chinese students that the whole SARS terror was manufactured by the foreign media." Li is now called, ‘the man with two faces’.
His colleague Jiao Guobiao got himself recently fired as a media professor at the Beijing University, after getting a good press in de West and a fellowship in the US. Jiao had fiercely attacked the Ministry of Propaganda as an out-of-date dinosaur. What Western media did not disclose in great detail was Jiao’s single-minded admiration for the US. In a rather poor poem Jiao wrote recently, addressing US soldiers in Iraq:
American soldier,Allow me to call you "Brother!"If you are looking for volunteers,Please let me know in the first instant!
Not the kind of stuff you would expect from a Beida media professor.
The internet again dissected his record. Jiao (oops: Li) was linked directly with the rigid limitation of the universities bulletin boards or BBS’s imposed last month. Those BBS’s were up to that moment the platform of the freest possible exchange of information in China. He asked the National People’s Congress to disallow people to enter the internet anonymously. And just that happened, to the dismay of many. Again another Chinese media professor was sending out messages that could easily confuse the average news consumer, both in and outside China.

No more heroes anymore. That is the effect of the internet on the traditional media, robbing them from a classic way to gain attention, both in and outside China. Revolutionary plumbers, media professors or diligent bus conductors will have a much harder time to survive the scrutiny of the public.

Fons Tuinstra

Correction: As one of the commentors noted: in the one before last paragraph I mixed up both professors. A correction has been added.