Chinese media needs to improve to compete

As the missing Malaysia Airlines plane continues to grab the headlines worldwide, the gap between Chinese and Western media in covering the incident has become ever more evident. During the first few days after the aircraft vanished from civilian radars, Chinese media criticized Malaysia Airlines for delaying the release of information, while their Western counterparts began to question the Malaysian government for suppressing crucial facts.

The gap has only become more obvious thereafter, as Chinese media have tried relentlessly to interview family members of the missing passengers aboard the plane, their stories have soon gone from being touching to getting emotional, while reporters that have been sent to cover the search and rescue operations have failed to collect any useful information. During this time, Western media replaced the Malaysian authority as the source of up-dated information. The Wall Street Journal, for instance, referenced engine data which its sources claimed indicated the plane could have remained in the air for a substantial period of time after it recorded its last contact with the ground. Before long, CNN quoted a classified analysis of electronic and satellite data suggesting that the flight likely crashed either in the Bay of Bengal or elsewhere in the Indian Ocean. Reuters, too, cited unidentified sources familiar with the investigation that whoever was piloting the jet was following navigational waypoints that would have taken the plane toward India's Andaman Islands.

Following these claims, the Malaysian government felt pressured to hold a news conference on Saturday, during which Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak suggested the disappearance of the jetliner might be the result of "deliberate action by someone on the plane".

The media disclosures also brought an appeal for international search efforts, taking the search operations into a new phase. However, Chinese media cannot claim the credit for this.

Of course, domestic media's disadvantage in reporting the incident is not entirely due to the subjective factors. Given that the world's core aviation technologies are still dominated by Western developed countries, understandably the Western media can get a head start in learning technical information. Nevertheless the coverage of the incident has exposed many problems with the Chinese media. For instance, the Chinese media has been over-reliant on the conferences and press releases, but such a traditional way of reporting works only when the official release is timely and authoritative, and it certainly did not work well in the case of this ill-fated jet.

Besides, in recent years the Chinese media has been obsessed with the so-called We-media, over-stressing the possibility of everyone being a journalist in the digital age. The fact is this is rarely a subject of discussion in Western media circle where there is a high professional threshold and a journalist is supposed to spend years learning and practicing to become a specialist in his or her reporting beats and develop their personal connections.

In China, the threshold is comparatively low, and journalists as a whole are young and less experienced, and at some point, the media industry runs in a speculative fashion, with journalists putting little effort into a specific subject area and instead putting all their energy into wooing followers on social media.

In 2012, the General Administration of Press and Publication outlined a going-out strategy under the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-15) for the press and publication industries. As the world's second-largest economy, China needs to make its voices heard in the international community, and the going-out strategy for the Chinese media thus suits China's fundamental interests. Chinese media's performance in covering the missing plane incident, nevertheless, is strong evidence that advanced reporting equipment and technologies do not guarantee world-class reporting. The country's development of journalistic soft power still has a long way to go, so do Chinese journalists, who need to do a better job in ferreting out the truth and informing the public.

A Chinese version of the article appeared in Dongfang Daily.

(China Daily 03/20/2014 page8)