The BBC’s China 1

The location of China Week within the rhetorical styles of conventional broadcasting and news reporting without actually being news exposes the discursive structure of those styles very neatly. It expresses a powerful effect of misrecognition by the BBC,¹ in which China Week was offered as a deliberate and self-conscious interpretive and pedagogical approach to China while presenting its broadcasts as if they functioned on the conventional bases of the notions of objectivity and neutrality which inform broadcasting and news reporting. China Week, therefore, invoked an ambiguous form of broadcasting, with the conventions of journalistic objectivity coming up against a self-conscious narration of a discourse of “China”.

Objectivity is as established an orthodoxy in the media as it is a dominant theme of critique in media studies. The self-professed purpose of journalism is to report “facts”, on the assumption that they can be understood as objective truths and conveyed with disinterest on the part of the journalist or broadcaster,² what Gaye Tuchman described in the early 1970s as the “strategic ritual” of objectivity.³ The history of the journalistic notion of objectivity has been thoroughly detailed in media studies⁴ and there are also parallels with the development of the notion of objectivity in the social sciences. Although contemporary news reporting may often self-consciously not heed the ideal of objectivity, the ideal itself remains a powerful legitimizing regime over the work of the media.

In the case of China Week, the BBC’s aim was to inform the British public as to the nature of China: “what life in China in 2005 is really like” (Asia Today, BBC News 24, 10 March, 2005). The BBC’s reports and broadcasts were all constructed on the basis of the powerful credibility the BBC holds as a global broadcaster as a producer of authoritative, informed, objective and balanced news and broadcasting.

In media and television studies, the critique of objectivity has rested on the notion of ideology, so that far from delivering objective truth, the media’s representation of events and subjects is understood as expressing particular ideologies through bias and omission.⁵ News reporting is criticized for expressing the interests of power, especially around social categories such as class, race, gender and the state and corporate power rather than upholding its avowed ideals. Early forms of critical and Marxist-inflected television studies such as that of the Glasgow Media Group exemplify this approach.⁶ This kind of work unpacks the relationship between the content and rhetorical conventions of news presentations so as to denaturalize them, showing how objectivity is merely a stylistic device, an authoritative, neutral presenting style for the reporting of events which effaces editorial political choices and biases, presenting news information as if the television production and editorial process was not introducing a wide range of ideological distortions.

Following media studies, needless to say the BBC’s presentation of China is open to a wide-ranging possible critique of its content and rhetoric. The non-news news of China Week was redolent with strong editorial decisions which delivered a proscribed range of themes and ideas about China through particular emphases or omissions, all of which showed China in a specific way. China Week might also be open to criticism for its occasional deployment of stereotypes and clichés about China and Chinese people.

Yet the traditional media studies critique of news reporting is predicated on the assumption that an objective idealized truth is in fact possible. This may be a less significant issue when, in the example of the Glasgow Media Group work the critical goal is necessarily also a political one, but in the context of broadcasting about China, this issue is more germane. A critique of China Week which aimed to show how it was ideologically biased assumes that there is a single truthful or correct understanding of “China” against which the BBC’s could be measured. This critique, therefore, makes a counter-appeal to a totalizing knowledge of the true nature of China, from which the BBC is accused of deviating with inaccuracies and omissions.

Rather than set up completing claims to know the “real” China in a critical response to China Week, the Week can be simply described on the basis of its claim on knowledge of China. At the level of epistemology, rather than rhetorical style, objectivity is a more fundamental feature of media reporting, becoming, in this broader sense, positivism, or an understanding of language which assumes the possibility of producing empirical knowledge of social categories which is independent of the structuring effect of the language that is used to express that knowledge.⁷ China Week was informed by the assumption that “China” is a bounded and totalizable reality, a singular social object which can be accurately reported, described and analyzed on the basis of a clear distinction between China as a social object and the media coverage that is producing an understanding of what China is.

Therefore, out of contemporary China’s pluralities and untotalizable realities, the BBC was producing its own coherent version of China. It was elaborated like those of academia or politics, with styles and registers which produced legitimate knowledge – knowledge that counts as knowledge – through specific epistemological mechanisms. It was structured in terms of temporality and had valorized themes. China Week shows how the BBC was engaged in an act to produce China as a discourse, the BBC’s China.

The breadth of China Week across the BBC was one of its unusual and defining features, giving its discursive production a scale not apparent in the more normal discontiguous individual news reports. It became, deliberately or otherwise, an institutional undertaking which produced different aspects of the BBC’s China across the different networks, taking on a multiplicity of legitimizing mechanisms. The networks and stations were operating within their different briefs to produce different kinds of knowledge, but which together offered the possibility of an encompassing knowledge.

The discursive production of China by China Week began with the introductions to the segments. In the context of the non-news news characteristic of the Week, these functioned as an explicit interpretive layer, constructing a delimited set of problematics and themes from which the British public could “know”, and know that it knew, China. On the 6 O’clock News, the newsreader said:

All this week, the BBC has been taking a closer look at China. It’s the world’s fastest growing economy and this year will overtake Britain. But economic liberation has not yet been followed by political freedom. In the first of a series of special reports for the 6 O’Clock News… (BBC1 6 O’Clock News, 8 March 2005).

This week we’ve reported on how much China has changed in recent years, but there’s been little reform in one area – religion. Today, religious minorities are still closely controlled. (BBC1 6 O’Clock News, 10 March 2005).

Like the other aspects of China Week, the introductions are part of the rhetorical strategies which began the process of legitimizing the BBC’s authorial voice. They were mediating between an imagined “British public”, which was assumed, possibly correctly, to be largely ignorant about China, and the reportage segments on television and radio.

After the introductions, the different networks of the BBC produced their distinct ways of knowing China. Analogies can be drawn between the kinds of coverage across the BBC and the different approaches possible from within academic knowledge of China. One can map China Week across academic models: Radio Five Live was doing ethnography or anthropology, taking in local, “ordinary” experiences; similarly on TV, BBC News 24 and BBC Breakfast were doing live crosses and talking to people in the street. This kind of knowledge was legitimized, like anthropology, by claims on an authentic, subjective Chinese experience – the personal voices of real Chinese people – as the site at which we can know China. In contrast, the Radio 4 spoken word network, the evening television news programs and the nightly Newsnight current affairs program, and some of the World Service were doing political science, sociology or policy analysis – broader studies of political and social processes in China. Instead of the personal and subjective, this was the systematizing effect of abstract analyses, outlining themes and offering explanatory models from which it could be claimed to know China. The interviews and “vox-pops” provide “data” which offers representative samples of Chinese lives, and the analysis and in-depth constructed reports function as “theory” to make sense of the “data”.

Radio Five Live spent a morning in a small town called Huiwu south of Chongqing, visiting a school and presenting descriptive knowledge:

In the background you can probably hear some children, they’re primary school children, exercising in what is their only area to exercise, a sort of rather scruffy playground … it’s … it’s pretty poor. I am looking at a three story building, it’s got the sort of white cement on the outside which is rough and in some places falling off…” (Radio Five Live, 11 March, 2005).

BBC News 24 crossed live to Shanghai where the journalist interviewed a representative example of urban China:

[Journalist] Cheng Yun, who’s 25, and she works for L’Oreal, the cosmetics giant. Cheng Yun, what’s it like to live in this city? [Interviewee] Oh, it’s very nice, I like [it] here, it’s a very dynamic city, and a lot of opportunities. … [Journalist] And you’ve come down here to do a bit of shopping here this evening. [Interviewee] Yes!(BBC News 24, 7 March, 2005).

Although these “vox-pops” might have been analogous to ethnographic knowledge, the epistemologies of electronic news are quite specific and distinctive from academic knowledge. A social scientist might survey a large number of people or analyze statistics to produce knowledge while surveys or qualitative research with a single subject would not count or be legitimate. For journalism, a single interviewee is legitimate, and this rests on both the assumption that they are representative of a broader objective social reality “China’s rural poor”, or “urban Chinese youth”, for example, and also that they themselves can offer analysis of that social reality.⁸ This is an improvisational epistemological mechanism in which the journalist uses his or her judgment, a “nose” for news, with which to assess the assumed representiveness of an interviewee.

For Newsnight, the 6 O’Clock News, and some of the segments on BBC News 24 and on radio, their contribution to China Week was extended analytical reports on topics including politics, the environment, the economy, human rights and daily life. In contrast to the improvisational and subjective “data” of the live coverage, these reports were detailed and structured with lines of argumentation:

[Journalist] Over the past two decades, China has put economic growth above all else, and with two hundred million Chinese still living on less than a dollar a day, relieving poverty remains vital. Coal offers the way out. As the demand for power grows, for the time being this means one thing, more emissions of climate changing gasses (BBC2 Newsnight, 8 March 2005).

These kinds of reports also use the convention of the “expert”, an academic or a government official for example, whose analysis is legitimized by the institutions of academia or by political power:

[Journalist] But China’s international reputation is now a mixed affair. [Expert interviewee 1] China is a partner in the fight against global international terrorism, and I think that’s won China some point in America and around the world … [Journalist] When it comes to proliferation, there is one area, North Korea, where China has made itself essential … [Expert interviewee 2] They have absolutely no desire to see a nuclear North Korea. (BBC News 24, 9 March, 2005).

Typically, news reporting offers a combination of the journalist’s analytic voice, perhaps with the legitimizing addition of the expert, and the subjective interviewee. On the Newsnight program under the subject of democracy:

[Journalist] This week, China announced it’s achieved ninety-nine percent democracy. In Tianjin, the mayor is trying to breath life into consultative bodies that used to simply rubber-stamp party decisions. … [Interview with street vendor, journalist] Do you think politicians in this city actually listen when people like you ask them things? [Interviewee] You mean the leaders? I feel from my point of view it’s not likely, because we’re not important, we’re too small and too far way from people with their social status.” (BBC2 Newsnight, 9 March, 2005).

In one example, knowledge of China was produced self-reflexively, by asking how much British people knew about China. The lighter magazine style of the Breakfast television program meant it self-reflexively includes the viewer, an imagined “ordinary” member of the British public, into its discursive production of China:

[Host] It produces half of the world’s cameras, a quarter of its washing machines, and ninety percent of the world’s toys. We’re talking about China’s economy which is expanding all the time. … [Interview subject] ‘This definitely says Made in China … [Interview with British woman, journalist] Jo, we’ve looked around your house, are you surprised by the number of products that are made in China?” (BBC1 Breakfast, 8 March 2005).

For television, unlike radio, or indeed academic knowledge, visuality is the basis of the legitimacy of its knowledge. In China Week, visuality functions as an analogue of its whole epistemology. Television coverage showed images of Chinese lives in which their visual presentation produces the effect of unmediated objective knowledge and which effaces the mediative processes of television production. As Stein has argued in the context of the US current affairs program 60 Minutes, following from Barthes’ critique of the news photograph, the visual representation of China in China Week is a privileged form of knowledge, unarguable as the “real China”. When we see something on television, we really know that we know it. The visual “in this medium professes to be a ‘mechanical analogue of reality.’ … [its] denotative status and the completeness of its analogy, ‘in short its ‘objectivity’,’ lends itself to the naturalized state of ideological common-sense”.⁹ The power of the image is such that it functions to produce China as an objective reality, powerful enough to overwhelm our awareness of the wholly constructed nature of the image by the television production processes.

An example of the power of the visual in China Week was a report on the Three Gorges Dam, under the theme “Environment”. A long shot took in the enormous scale of the Three Gorges Dam project, showing the viewer the reality of China’s promethean development and, in the context of the report, the costs to the environment. Then, however, the journalist intervenes, shown in a shot standing on top of a platform so as to survey the construction project. he adopts a literal privileged position from which to “know” China, and mediate between the “real” China of the image and the British viewer. From this position, the journalist explains the significance of the Three Gorges project:

When this dam is finished, it will be by some margin, the world’s largest hydroelectric powerstation … for the Chinese government, that’s obviously very good news, that will be cheap, clean electricity for China’s surging economy. But there is another side to the story of this dam, and that is its immense cost…” (BBC1 6 O’Clock News, 9 March, 2005).

Television’s visuality appeals with unique power to the possibility of unmediated objectivity, in contrast to radio which by definition makes explicit the mediative effects of the reporter on the reality he or she is reporting. Radio in this way demands both creative imagination on the part of the listener to “picture”, for example, the impoverished Huiwu school and a recognition of the interpretive role of the aural radio medium. In denoting the demand of the listener that he or she “picture” China’s reality, radio makes explicit the mediative and constructive mechanisms which television works equally explicitly to conceal.

¹ Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 163.

² John Humphrys, “Objectivity is our lifeblood”, The Guardian, 9 September 2005, 14.

³ Gaye Tuchman, “Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of the Newsmen’s Notion of Objectivity,” The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 77, No. 4 (January 1972), 660.

⁴ see, for example, Stuart Allen, News Culture, (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 1999)

⁵ see, for example, Stanley Budner and Ellis S. Krauss, “Newspaper Coverage of U.S.-Japan Frictions: Balance and Objectivity,” Asian Survey, Vol. 35, No.4 (April, 1995),3 36-356.

⁶ The Glasgow Media Group, “Bad News,” Theory and Society, Vol. 3, No. 3, (Autumn, 1976), 339-363.

⁷ Michael J. Shapiro, Language and Political Understanding: The Politics of Discursive Practice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 130.

⁸ Stuart Allen, News Culture, (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 1999), 36-39.

⁹ Sarah R. Stein, “Legitimating TV Journalism in 60 Minutes: The Ramifications of Subordinating the Visual to the Primacy of the Word,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, Vol. 18, No. 3, (September 2001), 251.