Becoming global, remaining local: the discourses of international news reporting by CCTV-4 and Phoenix TV Hong Kong

Abstract

In an attempt to examine the issue of glocalisation in contemporary Chinese media practice, the article develops a tripartite framework which examines the discourses of global/Western vs. local/Eastern interactions in news reporting along three dimensions: the nature of the news event reported, the stance adopted in reporting the news, and the move structure involved in the reporting. The projection and discursive management of the international news reports by two prominent broadcast media channels in Cultural China, i.e. the Chinaowned and Beijing-based station, CCTV-4, and the Hong Kong-based channel station, Phoenix TV, have been selected for the investigation. It is found that globalisation in these two pan-or pro-Chinese government broadcasting practices has taken place only marginally. In trying to demonstrate a global vision and readiness for change and challenges, the Chinese broadcasters no longer evade news of a negative nature, and have also largely adopted the globally prevalent pattern of a dialogic news story-telling structure, most evident in the news construction done by Phoenix TV, though less so by CCTV-4. Nonetheless, the value of harmony, the normative Chinese value of journalistic practice, has a strong presence in the media practice of both channels, as is evidenced particularly in the use of a supportive reporting stance, rather than the critical reporting stance favoured by Western journalism.

Popular journalism in China: A study of China Youth Daily

“…If it is representative of a class of titles, however, it is evidence that the strategies that have been used to popularise and legitimise the contemporary form of the Communist Party's rule in, for example, television drama, have a parallel in the newspaper press. In that context, the case of Phoenix TV's news programmes, which replicate more or less the same agenda on important issues as Xinwen Lianbo, while presenting these topics using techniques familiar from CNN or the BBC, suggests itself as a close parallel (Wu & Ng, 2011).…”

A corpus-based study in comparing the multimodality of Chinese- and English- language newspapers

“…In spheres of communication less subject to globalization, such as institutional meetings and family gatherings, cultural influence on language seems to be stronger and to have a longer-lasting and more durable effect on how entities are perceived. Wu and Ng (2011) take a similar position concerning journalistic practices in mainland China and Hong Kong. They argue that globalization has had only marginal effects, such as increasing the use of the dialogic story-telling structure, with Chinese values, such as the need for harmony, remaining intact as the normative view of journalism.…”

Foreign Correspondents

“…These values are tied with Chinese foreign correspondents' roles, domestic situations, and professionalization. Wu and Ng (2011) revealed that the Chinese broadcasters no longer avoided news of a negative nature but still a larger percentage of the news events reported by CCTV-4 was positive rather than negative. They argue that Chinese journalists, as the government's nation-building partners, use a harmony-oriented, supportive editorial stance in managing international news to project an image of a peace loving nation (ibid).…”

“…The Chinese media have undergone transformations from being a state propagandistic vehicle only to also "serving the interests of the global as well as the local audiences"; and from a state-owned media institution to "a media of capitalistic body with socialist characteristics". (Wu & Ng, 2011) In terms of ideology and values, Pan (2000) states that the center of China's party-press system is constituted by the "central value system" of communist ideology and the apparatus that enforces it. After the reform and opening up policy was established in the late 1970s, the Chinese government continued to immerse itself in the ideology of the Cold War, even after the collapse of the Soviet Union (Zhang 2012).…”