Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, September 23, 1994 TAG: 9409240016
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KENNETH RYSTROM
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The talks are not likely to lead to the kinds of freedom that Westerners have in mind, if the experiences this summer of a group of American journalism educators provide any indication.
If anything, China is moving away from what we consider to be freedom of the press.
We were told, for example, that earlier this year China forced Star TV in Hong Kong to remove the only news program (BBC World Service) that was being offered on the 12 television channels that Star beams via satellite into China.
About the same time the government in Beijing announced that privately owned satellite receivers no longer would be allowed.
The government wants the people to see only what the government allows them to see on local television or local cable.
(China has, for some time, jammed Voice of America radio.)
With China's new obsession with free enterprise, it is not surprising that the one area in which the Chinese media are copying the West is in advertising. We were told by both newspaper and television people that the government is forcing them to turn increasingly to ad sales to pay the bills.
But the government expects to continue to own all newspapers and all broadcasting stations and, through faithful Communist Party members, to oversee the news and editorial content of the media.
We saw a lot of evidence that the Chinese are seeking outside Western capital for joint economic ventures. But the journalists and educators we talked to foresaw no chance that the government would ever allow foreign money to touch newspapers or television.
Proposals for relaxing press controls were being talked about at the time of the Tiananmen massacre in 1989 - but nothing has happened since.
One of the professors we met has drafted a proposed new press law, but he seemed reluctant to discuss it with us. He did give a (Chinese-language) copy of the proposal to one member of our group.
I have since been told that this professor has been demoted from head to vice-head of his journalism institute, but that, with some changes, his proposal has been accepted for study in China's universities.
From our point of view, the proposed reforms don't ask for much. One of the goals would make it easier to establish additional newspapers and television stations, but still under some form of government control.
One of the proposals the professor was asked to remove called for greater access to satellite reception.
Neither the professors nor the journalists questioned what an editor on the English-language China Daily called China's ``different concept of the relationship between the government and the press.''
In the United States, he said, where a reporter tries ``to get inside stories,'' a government offical ``will be careful about information he's going to give (the reporter).''
But, he said, ``the Chinese always say that we are in the same boat."
``If a reporter goes to a government department, to a bureau chief or a vice minister, he treats him as an equal, as a comrade. He will tell him everything, on the condition that he shouldn't publish (whatever he's asked not to publish).''
A retired managing editor of the newspaper offered no apologies when he told us that the two purposes of China's newspapers are to explain the government's policies to their readers and ``to make China look good.''
``If China benefits, I benefit,'' he said.
This editor is not unfamiliar with Western journalism. He told us that he had studied in the United States and had visited several American newspapers.
As long as China's leading journalists remain comfortable with the attitude that he expressed, more liberal ideas of press freedom are likely to be a long time coming.
Kenneth Rystrom is a professor in communications studies at Virginia Tech.
by CNB