The media cycle in China
This news report was filed in early May, just after China held its 100-days-until-Olympics celebration… listen to the issues the reporter talks about and pay particular attention to his report on the Tibet protesters:
Don’t those stories feel like some relic of the past? Thus is the news cycle for you, coming and going like flash floods. One week the Internet seems saturated with negativity, and the very next — because the people have had enough — it gets drained of all substance. When’s the last Western news report you’ve seen on Tibet? Or the words “Olympic boycott”? (No, Sharon Stone doesn’t count.) They’ve practically disappeared from our dialogue.
And it’s telling how the reporter says that “pollution” has been bumped off the front pages, because in much the same way the Wenchuan earthquake bumped Tibet off the front. More and more, China’s been able to dictate the storylines in the lead-up to the Olympics, this from a government that has plenty of experience dictating what can and can’t be said. It should be noted that the Chinese people are more than slightly complicit in self-censorship, with netizens circling the cybersphere like sharks or modernized Red Guard (”online lynch mob,” as the Shanghaiist puts it) ready to pounce at the first whiff of blood.
Then again, pollution has slowly but surely been making a comeback, which leads me to wonder: in the two months before the Opening Ceremonies, because two months is a long time, is Tibet going to resurface as an issue? And if not Tibet, then something equally damaging to China’s reputation, like reports of anger and protests out of Sichuan?
I’m betting yes. But we’ll see.
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