There's an interesting difference between American and Chinese TV News:
American TV news spends the vast majority of its time talking about disasters, crimes, potential problems that you will run into in life, and then spends most of the rest of its time talking about what other sensational thing they are going to show next in order to get you to keep watching.
Chinese news spends the vast majority of its time talking about its developing economy.
Often, Chinese news doesn't make me feel as awful about the world after.
But that doesn't mean that Chinese news is always positive. Or sometimes it means to be positive but rubs my American-raised mind the wrong way. For example, when they are showing this burning hot steel being heated up enough so that it can bend into the correct form, and there, maybe 20 feet away or less is a worker with a hardhat on. Besides the hardhat, he is wearing nothing particularly special to protect himself. Nothing to protect his eyes from the blinding white light that is coming from the furnace and nothing to protect his face from flying metal sparks that seem to be flying everywhere. The news reporter continues to report on the success of the business as the worker looks blankly at you from the side of the screen.
The next news topic is the pearl markets. The camera shows people individually sorting through piles and piles of harvested pearls. That kind of tedious work might outrage the average American. They would never agree to do that work themselves. And I don't know how many would like seeing that sort of work being done on TV. (But I'm sure they'd still go to the pearl market and buy pearls for their friends...along with their clothing and just about everything else we buy from China that is tediously put together. Many of these factories don't seem to have as many machines as we assume. I've seen documentaries showing a woman spending day after day poking a hole through a small plastic part and the woman after her in the assembly line squirting water through the hole to make sure the hole is complete. They weren't protesting on the documentary, they were just working. Work in China, for the ordinary people, is just work.)
It's still nice to watch more positive news than American news, but there are so many special words related to the development of the economy that I have trouble following the news here. I'm hoping by watching it every other day or so for half an hour, my listening comprehension will get tons better. Because right now, they speak way too fast for me to absorb exactly just what sort of economic progress is happening...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
My parents, who take in a good amount of both US and Chinese news, would tend to say that Chinese news is still significantly biased toward the government. While it's not nearly as skewed as it has been in previous decades, mainstream Chinese news is nonetheless government-controlled, and the government would naturally prefer that you feel good about (contributing to) your country's developing economy.
Likewise, mainstream US news is controlled by the media corporates that, despite their alleged ties to government, run on capitalism and tend to air the more sensationalist stories. Of course they'll talk about the new deadly disease that you won't get but will still worry over, because that's how they get people to watch.
The upshot is that independent journalism easily finds its audience in the US, whereas a Chinese filmmaker doing the equivalent of "Enron" or "An Inconvenient Truth" has virtually no chance at comparable success. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but after having gotten used to independent journalism and taking it for granted, I find it difficult to stomach spoonfuls of Chinese news when I visit.
Sorry for the rant, Annie.
Post a Comment