News and Media

Transpacfica: Enviro reporting as demeaning?

A fellow Medill alum, Graham Webster, writes a blog, Transpacifica.net, focused on Sino-Japanese relations.

Recently, Webster critiqued some of James Fallows’ recent blog commentary about the idea of whether or not foreigners are “dissing” China by noticing the country’s pollution. Fallows’ post was written in direct response to a note he received from Shelly Kraicer, a Canadian writer and film-festival programmer, based in China, who runs a web site on Chinese film, ChineseCinema.org.

In his note to Fallows, Kracier talks about the “all too predictable undercurrent of looking down from lofty developed Western heights to squalid undeveloped Third World depths (”tut tut, of course they just can’t get it right, the way we know we could”). He says that “the positioning of the discourse on pollution is suspect, and reinforces a set of ugly structures that keep “us” thinking about “them” in very unhelpful ways.”

As Webster points out on Transpacifica, Fallows doesn’t really provide an in-depth analysis of the hypothesis that the “Western focus on environmental catastrophe in China is, in some way, part of a long process of belittling the Chinese.” He merely acknowledges an intriguing question.

Webster, however, presents a more lengthy response:

• Are Pollution Stories Anti-Chinese? Sometimes, yes.
  By Graham Webster
  Transpacifica
  November 17, 2007

Let me start by pointing out what Fallows didn’t bring up: It’s simply not an accurate representation of “Western” news coverage to say they only focus on the environment. Thousands of stories come up in Google News searches on China and human rights, or China and Darfur. The U.S. press is preoccupied much of the time with a possible economic and military threat from China. The way I see it, at least the English-language news world focuses on several major story-lines with China, and the environment is one. It may be more prominent because the environment (thankfully) is a major story overall, and China plays an important role in the global environment.

That said, it is not unreasonable to criticize a large number of North American and European press reports for a failure to put China’s present environmental problems in perspective, especially when it comes to air quality in the cities.

Read his full post here.

In my own opinion, I do not believe that Western media is purposefully trying to paint an ugly picture of China’s environment. However, I think it’s easy to fixate on stories about catastrophe, and the environmental crisis in China is definitely a easy-to-sell story with significant political, social and economic implications, especially as the last few months have brought on a slew of scandalous reports about tainted toys, beheaded government officials and poisonous drugs.

I wrote briefly about the media’s hyper-critical stance toward China in my post, “What I’ve learned so far about China, blogging and self-promotion…” and I repeat it here:

5. China is really messed up.

And we’re really messed up for giving it such a hard time. I’m no China-phile. I’m not even a particularly passionate activist. So I’m not advocating that we forgive the former Community country for all its trespasses. But the news in recent months has painted a really dirty, chaotic picture of China, and I gotta say, I feel bad for the Big C. Even the positive news that I’ve read seems to come with a caveat or a hint of skepticism. What really irks me is that China’s many scandals create the opportunity for countries like the United States to step in and play The Responsible Regulator, brandishing the international police stick, thus creating a hero-victim scenario. Yes, China is really messed up, but in order for it to rise from any of its ashes, to borrow from the stereotypical myth of the phoenix, it needs to have the right infrastructure, the authority, the political will, and the support of the international community.

Whatever the case may be, bad news is sometimes better than no news, because at least once people become aware of a problem, they can’t ignore it.

[tags]China, environment, media[/tags]

Sphere: Related Content

© 2007 ResponsibleChina.com: Environmental sustainability, corporate social responsibility and social entrepreneurship in China..