China's Environment and China's Environment Journalists

Zeng Rong, Hugo De Burgh

Description

Environmental issues are of growing concern in China, with numerous initiatives aimed at encouraging dialogue and increasing awareness. And key to these initiatives is the environmental journalist. The first English-language study of this burgeoning field, this book investigates Chinese environmental journalists – their methodologies, their attitudes toward the environment and their views on the significance of their work – and concludes that most respond enthusiastically to government promptings to report on the environment and climate change. Additional chapters demonstrate journalists’ impact in helping to shape governmental decision-making.

China's Environmental Governance

Findings

Illustrative Cases

Recommendations

Conclusion  

Sujets

• Ethnic Studies
• Media Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• General officer
• Cultural studies
• Journalism
• General
• China

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 novembre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781841506067
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

China s Environment and China s Environment Journalists A Study
China s Environment and China s Environment Journalists A Study
Hugo de Burgh and Zeng Rong
First published in the UK in 2011 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2011 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2012 Hugo de Burgh and Zeng Rong
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Holly Rose Copy-editor: Macmillan Typesetting: John Teehan
ISBN 978-1-84150-469-8
Printed and bound by Hobbs, Tatton, Hampshire, UK
Contents

Chapter 1: Contents
Origins of this book
China s media today
Method and acknowledgments
Chapter 2: China s Environmental Governance
Environmental issues: Overview
The system for managing the Chinese environment
Principles of environmental governance
Issues
The localisation of power
Citizen involvement with compliance
Effects of the Internet
NGOs and what journalists think of them
The influence of globalisation
The rule of law
The right to know
External assessments
Chapter 3: Findings
Reporting the environment: The current situation
What are the deficiencies in reporting?
Range of stories and main themes
How reporters work
Media influence on environmental issues
Stories unpublished and what they tell us
Whence do journalists get their stories?
Obstacles to reporting and publication
Reporters solutions
Recent developments
Chapter 4: Illustrative Cases
The South China Sea
Xin an area water resource development
The Round Bright Garden
The Tiger Leaping Gorge
The Tibetan antelope
Canton s ambient haze
The Songhua River story
A Xiamen chemical factory
The Nu River
The Three Gorges Dam (Dai, 1989: 6)
The Sanlu milk powder case
Lake Tai and Mr Wu Lihong
Chapter 5: Recommendations
Policy-makers and lobbyists in the environmental field
Environmental awareness among media managers
Decision makers in the Chinese media community
Developing competencies in-house
Media departments in educational establishments
Relevant Chinese authorities
International media development actors
Chapter 6: Conclusion
Bibliography and References
Glossary
The Authors
Acknowledgements

Aside from ourselves, the interviewers were Dr Marina Svensson of the University of Lund, Chang Yiru, then of CCTV9, and Alja Kranjec of the China Media Centre. The manuscript was copy-edited and valuable advice was given by Mary Hodge. Additional assistance was rendered by Aurogeeta Das and Guo Xu. The writers acknowledge with gratitude the work of their fellow interviewers and also the role of Colin Sparks. Professor Sparks, then Director of the UK s leading media research unit, the Communications and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) of the University of Westminster, made the case for the research project to its sponsors, International Media Support (IMS), acting for the Government of Denmark, who thereafter commissioned the China Media Centre to execute it. IMS representatives Ann-Nina Finne and Martin Broom were unwavering in their support. A report of the research upon which this book is based, by de Burgh and Zeng, is available on the IMS website. The illustrations were assembled by Zhu Xiaowen, who put in a great deal of effort to do so. We are grateful to her and to photographers An Guangxi, Zhao Lianhai and Wang Yongchen for generously allowing their pictures to be used. Melanie Marshall at Intellect has seen the project through and we appreciate her helpfulness and efficiency.
Chapter 1

Contents
Origins of this book

In June 2009 a seminar on environmental journalism in China was held in Peking under the auspices of Caijing magazine, China s foremost financial periodical and a leading exponent of investigative journalism. It was instigated by International Media Support (IMS), a non-governmental organisation which is funded by the Danish government to train journalists around the world in what that government advocates as good practice.
In Europe, governments concerns about global warminghave resulted in much attention being devoted to raising awareness of it among their citizens through environmental journalism. This is because they believe that environmental journalism can help to shape European policy and strengthen civil society by informing and mobilising individuals and grass roots organisations.
In China rapid industrialisation is throwing up concerns about pollution, and has led to a growth in its environmental organisations and networks of environmental journalists, along with a widespread disquiet over the possible impact of China s environmental problems on the rest of the world.
Thus, having decided to focus on the question of how the Chinese media are dealing with environment issues, IMS commissioned the China Media Centre (CMC) to interview the participants and report on the seminar. The CMC is a specialist research institute based in London, which, in addition to its research, has carried out consultancy projects for European and Chinese institutions. It is a self-supporting component of the UK s leading research organisation dealing with the media, CAMRI (Communication and Media Research Institute).
As far as we are aware, little research has been conducted on how the media reflect environmental issues in China, although China s Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) has for some years been producing reports of its own activities aimed at stimulating media interest in environment issues (see http://zls.mep.gov.cn/ ).
In the West, the influence of the media on public perceptions of environment issues has been examined by a number of academics, notably Hansen (1993) and Boykoff and Rajan (2007). The latter found that journalism and public concerns have shaped decisions in climate science and policy, just as climate science and policy have shaped media reporting and public understanding (2007: 210). Other studies see the media as agenda setting, or at least having a powerful influence in determining how people view the issue - see Wilson (1995), Ungar (2000) and Corbett and Durfee (2004). Reinforcing the findings that media coverage influences public attention to climate change are studies by Trumbo (1994) and Hester and Gonzenbach (1997).
China s media today 1

Although news production in China still operates in an authoritarian political system, in which the political leadership aims to guide and control both the media and public opinion, the Chinese media world has altered as a result of far-reaching ideological and socio-economic changes. These include commercialisation, globalisation, the increased social tension between the poor and the rich and the rising consciousness of the media s social and cultural responsibilities in China s public discourse.
In the 1990s, the major characteristic of the Chinese media was that they were subject to often contradictory forces - the market s commercial line and the Party s political line. Today, they have to be alert to the expectations of the public as well; they need to be more responsive to customers, and to cover issues that interest them with treatments that appeal. At the same time, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) calls upon the media to supervise official institutions as a way of curbing widespread and serious problems, such as corruption and the negligent implementation of laws and policies. These developments have brought about more critical and investigative reporting and a reinvigorated role for the media as mediator between State and citizens (for a discussion of earlier manifestations of media-authority relations, see de Burgh 2003). Over the past twenty years, investigative reporting has sometimes been vigorously undertaken and widely valued, although interpretation varies (de Burgh 2003a; Tong 2008; Wang 2009; Tong2011).
A different factor contributory to the growth in investigative reporting is a developing professionalism among journalists, who increasingly see themselves as scrutinisers of the powerful and protectors of the weak and vulnerable. Several newspapers and magazines, such as Beijing Youth Daily, Weekend South, Southern City News and Caijing, have a reputation for publishing critical and investigative stories. Since the early 1990s, there has also been a proliferation of investigative programmes on television, such as News Probe and Focal Point.
However, the media remain under government supervision, and stories can be killed by the government at the local or provincial level; local media may find it risky to investigate abuses by people who are powerful in their own locality and therefore feed the stories to journalists from elsewhere, in the hope both of fulfilling what they see as their professional duty and of receiving reciprocal help later.
International observers have been very critical of what they perceive as Chinese government suppression of information and the persecution of some journalists by various authorities. Foreign journalists operating in China have also been critical of their handling - and that of their Chinese colleagues - although there maybe a consensus that, from the foreigners perspective, the situation is improving (Watts 2007).
On occasion, journalists enlist the international media - or at least provide the information on which those media may base stories - to get their reports published. Increasing attention is being paid to Chinese environment issues by the western media, and some of this (as we shall see below) has impressed Chinese journalists, although it can also be viewed as motivated by hostility to China.
In rece