Professor Pan tells all

On Wednesday we had a meeting with Professor Pan, a mass communications professor who teaches in Wisconsin but is doing research in China on new media. He is from China but has lived in the US for 25 years, so he had both an outsiders and an insiders perspective on journalism here. He was way more open than anyone we have talked to so far, and gave us the low down on how journalists operate in this country. We already knew that a lot of censorship goes on, mainly by the journalists themselves out of fear of reprisal from the government. In China, the government owns all the media outlets, and informs them about what stories are not okay to write and how to cover certain issues (like the earthquake, for example). But they are really only concerned with political matters that might affect keeping the government in power, so there is more press freedom here than we often think. What we learned from Pan is that another tactic used by the government to maintain media control is to keep the wages of journalists so low that in order to make a living they must supplement their income by taking “donations” from subjects they are covering. Its basically standard practice to bribe journalists into writing good stories about you, and not only does everyone do it, but the general public knows about it and thinks its fairly acceptable. This just blew my mind. I know that corruption is pretty common here, but apparently because other people are so much more corrupt (turns out politicians and teachers are the worst) that the journalists seem mild by comparison. And because everyone does it, as a journalist you are pressured by your co-workers to follow along. We were all wishing that we had gotten to talk to Pan earlier in the trip, because we would have had some serious questions about this to ask of all the journalists we’ve been meeting along the way. Of course, the next day at Fudan University School of Journalism, all the professors told us that practice was “not as common” anymore. But judging by the way they answered all our other questions, I’m pretty skeptical that that’s the last word on the subject. China just continues to teach me things.