On Objectivity
Each year I ask my students to complete a simple assignment.  They are to take a list of links for news organizations (CBS, NPR, Fox, MSNBC, NYTimes, Wall Street Journal) and find one story with an international dimension reported in the past couple of months that is covered on each site.  They identify what facts were common to all stories, which only appeared in one story, and we discuss these findings. 

Part II then asks them to search a second set of links for coverage of the same story (BBC, Al Jazzera, China Daily) in at least two, best all three, of these sources.  The discussion is always interesting, but I want to focus on one surprisingly consistent response from my students.  Without prompting (initially, the thought would have never occurred to me) my students have noted, every year, that the paper run by the Chinese Communist Party,China Daily, is ‘by far the most objective source.’ 

 

There is much that can be said about this, but let’s start with this:  If you go to the link below and review the China Daily you will see it is nearly devoid of conflict (other than gently pointing out the ways that non-Chinese news stories or nation states do not quite understand the wisdom of China’s position).  Here is a story, in its entirety, from today’s China Daily on the acceptance speech delivered by the most recent Chinese Nobel Prize winner, Mo Yan, who was awarded a much-deserved Nobel Prize in Literature this year.

In the lecture titled "Storytellers," he talked about how he started story telling as a child and shared with the listeners his memory of his childhood and mother, "the person who is most on my mind at this moment."  "As repayment for mother's kindness and a way to demonstrate my memory, I'd retell the stories for her in vivid detail," said Mo Yan.  He also recalled memories of being surrounded by adults instead of children of his age after he dropped out of school, which "created a powerful reality" in his mind and later became a part of his own fiction.

By introducing the background of his most famous works such as "Frog," "Life and Death are Wearing Me Out," "Big Breasts and Wide Hips," "The Garlic Ballads", "Sandalwood Death" and "The Transparent Carrot," Mo Yan shared the inspiration behind the stories and the way they were produced.  "Many interesting things have happened to me in the wake of winning the prize, and they have convinced me that truth and justice are alive and well," said Mo Yan.  "So I will continue telling my stories in the days to come," he said at the end of his lecture.

As if in response to the countless Americans demanding our news sources 'cover more good news,' this story has a certain Disneyesque happy face character to it common to most of the China Daily stories.  Which is not the same as saying it is inaccurate.  But it is neither ‘fair and balanced’ nor ‘all the news that fit to print.’  Here are selections from another report on the same speech to highlight the part of the story that has been left out.

Nobel literature laureate Mo Yan was assailed Saturday in the Chinese dissident community as a “prostitute” following his Nobel lecture, but the speech was acclaimed in the communist state’s media….

“In the last few days, he has defended the system of censorship… then in his lecture he talks about story telling — to use a Chinese expression, he is like a prostitute insisting her services are clean,” dissident poet Ye Du, a member of the non-government Independent Chinese Pen Center, told AFP.  “As far as an assessment of him, in literature he has some merit, but as a living human being, he is a dwarf.”

Ye said Chinese intellectuals had hoped Mo would use the lecture to renew his call for the Chinese government to release jailed 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, but instead he voiced support for China’s system of state censorship….

Let me be clear.  I am not, here, taking a position on Mo Yan (which means 'do not speak') or his speech or censorship in any country (enforced through state agency or through extreme economic inequality).  My point is that we may want to reflect on objectivity, rethink what we mean by objective news, particularly if this is a label meant to indicate a notion of free press and free speech designed to support and advance democracy.