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Sunday, April 05, 2020, 16:08
The thin line between journalism and covert patriotism
By Richard Cullen
Sunday, April 05, 2020, 16:08 By Richard Cullen

In February this year, the US reclassified a set of Chinese media organizations as foreign missions (including the China Daily, CGTN and Xinhua) and set a cap on their numbers, effectively expelling 60 staff.

At about the same time, Beijing expelled three Wall Street Journal reporters after that paper published an article which callously headlined that China was the “real sick man of Asia”.  In mid-March, Beijing expelled around a dozen (almost all American) staff of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal in what was explained as a reciprocal response to the recent unfair treatment of Chinese media in the US.

In March, the Editorial Board of the New York Times offered its views on this mutual expulsion of media staff by the US and China.  The board stressed that, although the Chinese media organizations reclassified as foreign missions by the US do report news, “they are state-controlled, their reports serve the interests of the state and …their oversize staffs include spies”. 

The US news organizations were, in contrast “fully independent and report on China as dispassionately and honestly as they do on the American government”.  Moreover, the Voice of America, which is publicly funded, was characterized as being committed, by its charter, to accuracy and balance.

How well do these claims of definitive, independent operational difference stand up?

One key lesson the US military took from the Vietnam War was that reporting on military activities had to be more controlled in future

All reporters have a point of view – if they did not, they would not take up journalism as a profession.  Mainstream correspondents are typically more likely than others to cleave to certain robust, broad narratives which will often form the framework for their reporting. 

Such narratives are characteristically shaped by the national culture within which a given media sector operates.  This will be still more evident when steadfastness is being stressed, for example, when a country feels more nationally endangered than usual. 

In an extended interview with the New York Times in 1995, the celebrated American writer Gore Vidal was asked about what shaped the way America worked and how those exercising power go about that task.  “They don’t have to conspire,” Vidal said, “Because they all think alike – I mean who runs the [New York] Times, Harvard and the State Department and Hollywood?  The country has always been an oligarchy of money.”

One key lesson the US military took from the Vietnam War was that reporting on military activities had to be more controlled in future. 

When the time came for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, after the terrible 911 terrorist attacks in the US, almost all mainstream US media commentary on that Iraq War was “embedded” reporting from within the military operation. Speaking to the Guardian after this, Dan Rather, the American CBS network news anchor for 24 years, said that that war had made “stenographers out of us”. He added that there was a fear in every newsroom of losing your job – or of being labelled as unpatriotic if you questioned the deceptions leading up to the Iraq War.

That was an exceptional time, of course. But we again live in exceptional - if less directly violent and bloody - times. In October, 2018, the Vice President of the US Mike Pence made a speech at the Hudson Institute, which was widely portrayed in the global press, according to Fortune magazine, as an official declaration that the US and China were engaged in a “New Cold War”.  Note, this was not a step taken in Beijing – but a declaration made in Washington.

But what of that spies-in-our-midst concern raised by the New York Times?  Richard Hughes, a remarkable Australian journalist and writer who died in 1984, was a legendary figure within the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club. The Sydney Morning Herald, in 2017, noted that Hughes was also presumed to be a part-time British intelligence agent – and a double agent, working for the Russians, encouraged by MI6. The same newspaper reminded us, in 2010, that perhaps the most famous post-war spy ever, Kim Philby, moved in and out of journalism. As to US examples, I doubt that anyone could teach the CIA anything about using well-suited cover occupations - not least journalism - for spies.

Foreign correspondents from all jurisdictions regularly stand, sometimes conspicuously, with their country and on many issues, they will have “skin in the game”.  This is a widespread reality. But the best reporters think seriously and write lucidly whatever point of view they may favor. We can read and make our own evaluations of often well-argued reports. It is a pity to see their numbers being culled both in Washington and Beijing. 

There is, however, one restless superpower here which is feeling more challenged and indignant than usual. The former US Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, set out a resolute case, in 2019, in an article in Foreign Affairs for increasing the US confrontational approach saying that, “China wishes to usurp our country’s leadership role, certainly in Asia and evidently in the rest of the world”. This is the context within which Washington has taken the culling initiative this time around. 

The comparatively smooth historical shift from UK to US global hegemony over 100 years ago offers a valuable lesson to America today. Such a transition cannot be managed entirely without friction. But it can be accomplished with major reciprocal benefits when the impulse towards anxious or swaggering resentment is well controlled by both sides. And especially by the side feeling most challenged. Live and let live?

*The author is a visiting professor in the Faculty of Law, Hong Kong University

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