Inside China's State-run Media

By Sarah Matheson
Epoch Times Auckland Staff Oct 02, 2007


Former One News reporter Charlotte Glennie is now based in Beijing for the Australia Network, and says New Zealanders have a vested interest in learning more about China. (The Epoch Times)
Award winning New Zealand journalist Charlotte Glennie, says China's media is the mouthpiece for the communist party.

Well known in New Zealand for her coverage of the Boxing Day Tsunami, Miss Glennie has since become the China correspondent for the Australia Network, based in Beijing.

She said news in China is often blocked or dropped mid-broadcast if it exposes something negative about the Chinese regime.

China's propaganda department actually controls and instructs all of the state-run television, radio and newspapers, she said.

"Editors actually come in the morning and the have a list from the propaganda department and they have to follow that," she said.

But, the power of the Internet is changing China, she said, even though the communist party has blocked 18,000 sites.



"Editors actually come in the morning and the have a list from the propaganda department and they have to follow that."

- Charlotte Glennie, former One News reporter now working as a China correspondent for the Australian Network.


"Online activism is having an impact. By the time they [the CCP] are able to delete it, several thousand people have read it," she said.

Thousands of children and disabled people were being used to provide slave labour at a brick kiln in Hongdong County in Shanxi Province for 14 hours a day.

Some children were as young as eight years old. The parents appealed to the Chinese authorities for months.

But after the "virtual pressure" everything changed and people were prosecuted, Miss Glennie said.

Media Censored Mid-stream

A news report on CCN or the BBC can suddenly be shut down, with the screen going blank, if something like democracy gets mentioned.

"This happens all the time - even if CNN are doing an interview about press freedom," she quipped.

Miss Glennie interviewed Li Datong, the chief editor of the Chinese newspaper Freezing Point.

Mr Li, a communist party member, wrote a letter attacking his newspaper's scheme to offer financial rewards to reporters who regime officials praised, while deducting pay from reporters whose articles received criticism.

"He said to me the media in China is the official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party and that the Communist Party regards it as a weapon as powerful as the military."

She said bribes were a big part of Chinese journalism.

"There is a lot of money that changes hands in journalism in China. When you go to a business conference in China, journalists leave with a little bag of money from the company."

But foreign reporters can report on anything in China, she said.

"The catch on that is we are depending on our local sources. We have to protect them."

She said Western countries do not know enough about China.

"I think that now and in the future we have a vested interest in finding out more about China."

Break from Tradition

She said the one-child policy meant there were now 117 men to every woman in China, because infanticide against females is a huge problem in China. Miss Glennie has visited orphanages in China that are full of girls.

"The only boys up for adoption are disabled or handicapped," she said.

She said because there are so many men in China, women are marrying later and are more promiscuous.

It is a real break form tradition, she said.

"More women are being, and will be, abducted."

She is slowly learning Mandarin, but says language has been a real barrier, particularly with all the different dialects among different ethnic groups.

Miss Glennie won the supreme Qantas award for her coverage of the Boxing Day Tsunami in 2006 for One News, and a Special Service Medal.

She was based in Hong Kong for One News until they closed their Asia bureau in 2006.

Epoch Times