【中文标题】所有适合发表的内容 － 为什么说新华社代表了新闻业的未来
【原文标题】All the Propaganda That’s Fit to Print - Why Xinhua, China’s state news agency, could be the future of journalism.
【登载媒体】新闻周刊
【原文作者】Isaac Stone Fish、Tony Dokoupil
【原文链接】http://www.newsweek.com/2010/09/03/is-china-s-xinhua-the-future-of-journalism.html
这个大会包含了一届成功的国际盛会所具备的所有元素：大人物的出席（谷歌、BBC）、重量级的主题（“数字时代”）以及国际要人的长篇大论演讲。新闻集团的CEO Rupert Murdoch甚至表达出一个愤怒的基调：向“内容剽窃”宣战。尽管这届会议的名称是“全球媒体峰会”，但是媒体的不满，尤其是英文媒体的不满，充斥了北京人民大会堂的三天会议议程。问题在哪里？这届会议简直就是一个宣传盛会，是中国共产党官方组织新华社主办的一届“媒体奥运会”。但是，如果中国继续按目前的方式发展，忽视新华社不是长久之计。
几十年以来，新华社是中国形象必不可少的代言人。它垄断了官方消息的发布权，它被赋予的行政力量让其它传媒机构痛苦不堪。但是，随着中国的经济实力和国际身份不断提升，北京厌倦了被西方媒体忽视和诽谤的现状。于是，新华社的角色被重新定位，成为中国在海外施加软势力的工具。仅在去年，这个有80年历史的信息发布机构开办了24小时的英语新闻频道；在纽约时代广场占据了一栋摩天大楼，还宣布了一项计划：通过6000多名海外记者，将海外新闻采集站从现在的120个增加到200个。为了不被西方同行抢在前面，新华社还推出了iPhone手机程序，内容包括“全天候的新华社新闻、卡通、财经信息、娱乐资讯”。
新华社的市值估计有数十亿美元，由此来看，它是一架昂贵的扩音器。但是，新华社社长李从军在去年曾经说，新华社的一项核心任务是：“打破西方媒体的话语垄断霸权主义”。这听起来是和Noam Chomsky（译者注：是当代极具影响力的语言学家、哲学家、政治评论家，也是反战反媒体的精神领袖。在语言学、哲学和政治上，均有诸多论述，持续对美国政府外交政策提出尖锐批评，也因此备受争议，与Robert Nozick、John Rawls并称为“美国人的三大良心”。）用一个鼻孔出气。新华社拒绝提供任何官员为这篇报道发表评论，借口是“放假期间”。但是很明显，它的这些扩张计划与宣传被赋予的新角色有关联。中国从前的游戏规则是压制新闻报道，现在则是铺天盖地的新闻轰炸，用自己的单方面信息充斥市场。PS照片已经是不入流的手段了。
然而，挑战在于为这些充斥了选择性失明的“新闻”找到观众。新华社新闻的典型句式相当拗口（“其中20％是感染了艾滋病病毒的人”），而且经常被刻意扭曲。在新华社的世界里，天安门×××从未发生过；轮子是邪恶的崇拜对象；达赖喇嘛是西藏的Guy Fawkes（译者注：16世纪英国阴谋组织成员，计划刺杀詹姆士一世和英格兰议会上下两院的所有成员，在后来的审判中被处死。）。新华社还搜集一些敏感话题的新闻——比如去年夏天死伤惨重的维吾尔族暴乱事件——仅向中国的官员发布。这就好像是纽约时报把一些消息盖上“内参报告”的章，提交给奥巴马总统查看。
尽管如此，新华社凭借一个极为重要的原因或许会成为新闻业的未来：成本。目前大部分新闻机构都陷入困境，新闻站被关闭，记者下岗，但是前“红色中国新闻社”在赚钱问题上一点都不担心。它处理新闻所使用的手法就像中国国有企业处理不值钱的小饰物和廉价服装的手法一样：从市场上拿来一个成熟的产品，用任何人无法企及的低价强占全球市场。标准普尔的一位媒体分析员Tuna Amobi说：“它具备一种内在的竞争优势。”他认为新华社的廉价新闻将会呈“燎原”之势。订阅新华社的新闻只需要5位数字的费用，而在美联社、路透社和法新社，这笔费用至少要6位数。对那些依然支付不起费用的客户，新华社的一项援助计划将会免费提供全套服务——内容、设备和技术支持。
对中东、非洲等发展世界来说，它的诱惑力无法抗拒，那里的新闻印刷品销售势头在上升，人们迫切地希望接触西方视角以外的故事。新华社运营的很多地区都没有被评估机构所覆盖，所以很难统计其读者群体的规模。但是在最近几个月，新华社与古巴、蒙古、马来西亚、越南、土耳其、尼日利亚和津巴布韦的政府新闻喉舌签订了内容协议，让其成为非洲和亚洲大部分地区首屈一指的新闻发布者，它在这里的立足点远远多于其它任何一家新闻机构。纽约亚洲社会中美关系研究中心的主任Orville Schell说：“它们的确是无处不在。”
当然，一旦新闻的内容不涉及中国，新华社杜撰的内容就不那么多了。以色列最大的一家报纸Yedioth Ahronoth的国外板块编辑Daniel Bettini说：“我经常阅读他们的报道。”巴基斯坦和土耳其的编辑也称赞新华社，说他们的语言简单易懂，文章质量提高得很快。中国驻土耳其政府新闻机构的通讯员Kamil Erdogdu说：“他们在第二次海湾战争中的报道非常不错，他们获得了很多第一手资料，我曾经多次引用他们的报道。”法新社和欧洲新闻图片社近期同意在海外销售新华社的图片资料。Jim Laurie是前ABC和NBC的通讯员，现任中国中央电视台的顾问（这家机构也在进行海外扩张），他说：“我不认为针对视频和图片的（监察制度）造成了什么不便，底限很重要。如果你发现一个视频的来源很好、非常可靠，而且价格便宜，你当然会点进去看一看。”
目前为止，知名的通讯社似乎都在淡化对此事的态度。美联社拒绝发表评论，法新社在截稿时间前也未给予回应。但是路透社把新华社的扩张看作是“全球局势的一种活力”的表现，这种看法被很多媒体分析人士所接受，他们认为新华社在新兴市场受到追捧的状况不过是昙花一现，仅仅是私有新闻机构可以承担高质量有线网络之前的替代方案。所有三家新闻机构为了帮助私有新闻社实现这种飞跃，都提供了更廉价的新闻覆盖网，当然附加了一定的条件（比如只播放国际体育节目）。但是，这种观点基于的假设是新华社在未来几年主要的角色依然是以宣传为目的的代言人。
最近几个月，新华社在努力改变自身的形象——在伦敦开办第一家书店、与联合国儿童基金会合作在6大洲为儿童提供福利、在欧洲安装数十块平板电视屏幕宣传其内容。即使新华社未能以此改变形象，赤裸裸的偏见也不会像限制前苏联冷战期间由100家新闻机构组成塔斯社那样阻止新华社的发展。的确是这样，新华社对美国的报道毫无公正可言。今年早些时候，五角大楼发布了一份有关中国军事野心的报告，新华社对此只字不提，它称此报告“毫无技术含量、模棱两可、前后矛盾”。但是在很多中国人看来，这似乎不过是另外一次意识形态的选择，就像在半岛电视台、福克斯新闻和MSNBC之间做一个选择。卡内基国际和平基金会的高级研究员裴敏欣说，非洲或者亚洲的编辑或许不会像五角大楼那样认为这些偏见不可忍受。
更大的一个问题是，新华社总是要考虑如何保全脸面，在一个认为“新闻覆盖率可以增强市场信心和国家统一”的组织中，这并不奇怪。最近的一篇文章讲述了中国总理温家宝在与学生们的一次谈话之后，承认自己“给岩石错误分类”。而文章的标题是“中国总理对岩石的负责精神赢得了赞扬”。对于真实的信息，连政府官员都知道要去西方媒体中寻找。世界其它国家的人也会照此行事的。
原文：
It had all the trappings of a globally significant confab: big-deal appearances (by Google, BBC), a weighty theme (“the digital age”), and speechifying by international pooh-bahs. Rupert Murdoch, the CEO of News Corp., even delivered a peppery keynote, vowing war on “content kleptomaniacs.” But despite its name, the World Media Summit was itself a media bust, especially in the English-speaking press, which barely covered the three-day event held last fall in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People. The problem? The conference was a propagandafest, a “media Olympics” hosted by the Xinhua News Agency, an official organ of the Chinese Communist Party. If China has its way, however, ignoring Xinhua won’t be an option for long.
For decades Xinhua has been an unavoidable presence in China. It has a monopoly on official news and the regulatory power to complicate life for other media outfits. But as China has grown in wealth and international stature, Beijing has tired of feeling overlooked or maligned by the Western press. So Xinhua’s role has been redefined, as a means for China to wield soft power abroad. In the last year alone, the 80-year-old outlet launched a 24-hour English-language news station, colonized a skyscraper in New York’s Times Square, and announced plans to expand its news-gathering operation from 120 to 200 overseas bureaus and as many as 6,000 journalists abroad. Not to be outdone by its Western peers, Xinhua has also released an iPhone app for “Xinhua news, cartoons, financial information and entertainment programs around the clock.”
With a price tag estimated in the billions of dollars, the new Xinhua is an expensive megaphone. But it’s key “to breaking the monopoly and verbal hegemony” of the West, according to remarks released last year by Xinhua’s president, Li Congjun, who often sounds like he’s channeling Noam Chomsky. Xinhua declined to make officials available for this story, citing “holiday season.” But clearly the effort has to do with the new rules of propaganda, too. Where the game was once about suppressing news, it’s now about overwhelming it, flooding the market with your own information. Airbrushing photos is for amateurs.
The challenge is finding an audience for “news” that is best known for its blind spots. The typical Xinhua sentence is thick on the tongue (“out of which 20 percent were the HIV-infected persons”) and often inaccurate by design. In Xinhua’s world, the Tiananmen Square massacre never happened, Falun Gong is an evil cult, and the Dalai Lama is the Guy Fawkes of Tibet. Xinhua also gathers sensitive news—such as the full heads-rolling horror of the Uighur riots last summer—and releases it to Chinese officials alone. It’s as if The New York Times were to stamp its scoops “internal reference reports” and file them to President Obama.
Nevertheless, Xinhua may be the future of news for one big reason: cost. Most news organizations are in retreat, shuttering bureaus and laying off journalists. But the former “Red China News Agency” doesn’t need to worry about the inconvenience of turning a profit. As a result, it might do for news what China’s state-run factories have done for tawdry baubles and cheap clothes: take something that has become a commodity and foist it onto the world far more cheaply than anyone else can. “It gives them an inherent competitive advantage” says Tuna Amobi, a media analyst for Standard & Poor’s, who thinks Xinhua’s cheap news “might fly.” A subscription to all Xinhua stories costs in the low five figures, compared with at least six figures for comparable access to the Associated Press, Reuters, or AFP. For customers who still can’t afford the fees, a Xinhua aid program offers everything—content, equipment, and technical support—for free.
It’s an alluring deal in the Middle East, Africa, and the developing world, where newsprint sales are up and there’s hunger for non-Western perspectives. Xinhua operates in areas uncovered by the ratings agencies, so its hard to gauge audience size. But in recent months, Xinhua has signed content deals with state-run outlets in Cuba, Mongolia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Turkey, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe, making it a leading source of news for Africa and much of Asia, with more boots on the ground in those continents than any other organization. “They are literally everywhere,” says Orville Schell, director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York.
It helps, of course, that Xinhua’s spin diminishes when the news doesn’t involve China. “I read them quite a lot,” says Daniel Bettini, foreign editor for Yedioth Ahronoth, one of Israel’s largest newspapers. Editors in Pakistan and Turkey also praise Xinhua, noting that the language is simple and the quality has improved. “In the second Gulf war they were very good,” says Kamil Erdogdu, China correspondent for Turkey’s state news agency. “They got many things first; I used them many times.” AFP and the European Pressphoto Agency recently agreed to sell Xinhua images abroad. “I’m not convinced [censorship] makes a whole lot of difference” for video and pictures, says Jim Laurie, a former ABC and NBC correspondent who now consults for China Central Television (which is also expanding abroad). “Bottom line is so important,” Laurie continues, that “if you see a source of video that is reasonably good, reasonably reliable, and reasonably inexpensive, you’ll access it.”
So far the more established wire services seem to be taking a philosophical approach. The AP declined to comment, and AFP didn't respond to a request for comment by press time. But Reuters sees Xinhua’s expansion as a sign of “the viability of the global landscape,” a view shared by many media analysts, who believe Xinhua’s popularity in emerging markets will be fleeting, a stop-gap until private news outlets can afford the higher-quality wires. To help companies make the jump, all three agencies offer coverage on a more affordable, à la carte basis (just global sports news, for instance). But this view assumes that Xinhua will be seen as a propaganda outlet for years to come.
In recent months, Xinhua has worked to change that image, opening its first bookstore in London, partnering with the United Nations Children’s Fund to cover the well-being of children on six continents, and installing dozens of public flat-screen televisions around Europe to show its feed. And even if the agency fails to improve its image, naked bias is not a handicap the way it was for TASS, the Soviet Union’s 100-bureau news agency during the Cold War. True, Xinhua’s coverage of the United States is hardly fair and balanced. Earlier this year, when the Pentagon unveiled a report on China’s military ambitions, it was brushed aside by Xinhua, which called it “ ‘unprofessional,’ guilty of ambiguities and inconsistencies.” But to many the Chinese perspective now seems like just another ideological choice on the dial, an option as valid as Al-Jazeera, Fox News, or MSNBC. An African or Asian newspaper editor might find the bias less annoying than the Pentagon does, says Minxin Pei, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
A bigger problem is the fact that Xinhua is often face-rakingly boring, as one would expect from an organization that believes “news coverage should help beef up the confidence of the market and unity of the nation.” A recent piece about Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao revealed how he had “mixed up his rock types” during a talk with schoolchildren and then owned up to it. CHINA’S PREMIER WINS PRAISE AS ROCK OF RESPONSIBILITY Read the headline. For real information, even government officials are known to read Western outlets. The rest of the world may continue to do the same. |
狗仔卡
发表于 2010-9-13 17:19
提升卡
变色卡
抢沙发
千斤顶
显身卡
发表于 2010-9-13 18:00
