When the Gulf War broke out 12 years ago, there were only three or four Chinese reporters in the Gulf region, all of them from Xinhua News Agency. During the Iraqi War that began this March, over 100 Chinese reporters rushed to the region, delivering breaking news to domestic TV, radio stations and thousands of newspapers. The era when thousands of newspapers published the same Xinhua news content is long gone.

So, how did the Chinese media do during this period and what impact did the live war coverage have on their audience? Who won the media war on war? As answered in Western Media and Wars published by Xinhua Press, the truth of war is just not what it seems.

Experts: media show in gulf region

The sharp rise of Chinese war correspondents in the Iraqi War reflected huge changes in the Chinese media. “The full, live coverage of war indicated a breakthrough,” said Zhan Jiang, director of the Journalism Department at China Youth University for Political Sciences. He added that the live broadcasting enlarged people’s right to know the inside story, and accorded with market rules and journalistic principles.

Also, Professor Yu Guoming, the dean of the Institute for Public Opinion Research under Renmin University of China, praised highly the changes of the Chinese media in the war period. “This is an important event for the Chinese media,” Yu said, attributing the change to the reform of media management. Chinese media reporting now gives greater emphasis to its responsibilities and this means protecting people’s rights to know matters that are in the public domain. It enables both ordinary people and state leaders to be aware of the latest news in the world. “Only by cultivating people’s ability to know, accept and judge the pluralistic concept will our society renew its vigor of growth,” he said.

Meanwhile, Yu also criticized some media for only chasing high audience rating, TV programme sales and speed of news instead of dealing with the matter of its truthfulness. In his opinion, war reporting, such as that in Iraq, no matter its quality or quantity, is not only what people need.

However, Li Xiguang, director of the International Communication Research Center, under the Tsinghua University, made an angry remark about the behavior of the Chinese media.

“There was no exclusive news,” he said, criticizing some Chinese media for becoming the mouthpiece of CNN, ignoring comprehensive reports from both parties. He added that there was still lots of catching-up to do with British, French, and even Arabic reporting counterparts. In his view, although some media achieved commercialization, they just pursued speed of reporting instead of authenticity – high audience ratings achieved through low cost. Therefore, there was lots of foreign news translation and little original news. Li noted that the majority of people care most about the interests of the ordinary person, but war reporting ignores ordinary people’s lives and presents war like a video game.

Li praised highly the Xinhua News Agency, for its reporting of the war from all the aspects, and for its breakthroughs, made possible by hiring a foreign correspondent.

Media war indicates a newspaper’s defects

Praise for the unprecedented live broadcasting of the Iraqi war was given mainly to television or radio broadcasters. In the words of Professor Zhan Jiang, TV news dominated the war reporting since television fully used its advantages over other media forms.

Professor Yu Guoming noted that TV programs, using the narrative qualities of suspense and confrontation, attracted people’s attention. “The Internet also played an important role,” he said. However, the advantage for newspapers still existed, not just in their full coverage of the war process but in the context, analysis and discussion of its effect, asking such questions as: what’s world policy in a post Iraqi-war era? How does the war influence world patterns? Will similar diplomatic activities appear in East Asia? Yu added that the effects of the war are profound and lasting. Compared with TV, newspapers are still at an advantage for full coverage as well as report summaries and in-depth discussion.

“I will always read the newspaper the day after watching a TV program,” said Professor Li Xiguang. During the so-called media war, the sales volume of newspapers should have dropped following TV’s live broadcasting. However, the reverse was true with live broadcasting driving up newspaper’s printing volume. People felt it was far from enough after watching a TV news report, and so resorted to reading newspapers for further interpretation and clarification.

“China’s newspapers were quite active in the war period,” said Zhang Yuqiang, the translator of Western Media and War. He said that some people liked to read newspapers, as they needed to recognize and know all about the war. On the other hand, newspapers can also correct oral mistakes from experts and no doubt did so. During the war period, International Herald Guide, Guangzhou Daily publicized extra articles and supplements with the new forms of communication creating pressure as well as becoming a driving force.

Industry insiders also praised highly the work of newspapers during this period. Xu Xin, the vice editor-in-chief of Xinhua Press, thought that paper publications were quite sensitive and had quick reactions. The in-depth and analytic background produced by newspapers met readers’ needs in some sense while also acting as an important supplement to TV reports. The popularity of the War of One Person, The Biography of Saddam Hussein and Western Media and War proved that.

Still, there are some differing opinions. Professor Zhan Jiang pointed out that China’s news magazines were stagnated, and book publishing had a rough time. With increasing speed, TV news, with its combination of visual, aural functions and quick delivery, dominated the market of pictorials, and forced newspaper extras out of the market. In his opinion, newspapers are the only paper publication which still have distinct advantages for daily printing.

Live broadcast not real truth of war

“The first casualty of war is the truth,” Prof. Zhan Jiang said, citing an American saying. It was clearly illustrated in Western Media and War, a book by British scholar Susan L. Caraces: any war presented by media is no longer true. The conclusion also applies to domestic media reports. But since the live broadcast doesn’t identify truth but be selective in its representation of the truth, why should we value reported war so highly? What’s the significance of live war broadcasts in the first place? President Bush and Saddam, like leading actors in a war series, performed with visual and musical accompaniment. Audiences felt puzzled when western media and al-Jazeera TV presented two totally different versions of an event. However, the truth did actually exist in Baghdad.

Prof. Yu Guoming commented that there should be no expectation for absolute truth from a report, and that it was impossible for the Chinese media to do so being a third party. He said that the news report should follow the rule of true clues, carefully checking at least two independent sources. Whatever, relative truth should be achieved and possible through continuous reports instead of just single reports.

Experts describe reporters as “dancers with handcuffs”, saying that they should seek relative truth through comparison of different news resources. Anyway, there’s still a long way to go for the Chinese media.

Although the media war has stopped for a while, it’s far from over. Scholars say that the Third World War has become the one chasing people’s attention, like an advertisement war, public relations’ war, and media war. An ‘eyeball’ economy, for example, has become the driving force of a new economy. Its influence comes from people’s attention and indirectly boosts their consumption.

When media more frequently invade our lives, and the mass of information make us feel lost, what will we do then?

(Written by Chen Xiang, translated by Tang Fuchun for china.org.cn , May 22, 2003)