The new president of China’s largest television network, the state-run organization known CCTV, drew fire over the weekend from Chinese press advocates and others online over comments urging journalists to drop their pretensions of professionalism and submit to being mouthpieces of the government.
Some on China’s free-flowing microblogs compared the new president, Hu Zhanfan, with the infamous Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
“The first social responsibility and professional ethic of media staff should be understanding their role clearly and be a good mouthpiece,” Mr. Hu was quoted by Agence France-Presse as saying to a press association gathering this year, months before he took the helm at CCTV.
His remarks, including a warning to journalists who do not take “up the position of mouthpiece” that they “will never go far,” were reported by China’s Xinhua news agency but attracted little notice at the time. Below is a partial translation by the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong of his remarks, as reported by Xinhua:
A number of news workers have not defined their own role in terms of the propaganda work of the Party, but rather have defined themselves as journalism professionals, and this is a fundamentally erroneous role definition. Strengthening education in the Marxist View of Journalism and raising the quality and character of news teams is not just very necessary, it is a matter of extreme urgency.
The report continued:
Concerning social responsibility and professional ethics, editor-in-chief Hu Zhanfan believes that the first and foremost social responsibility [of journalists] is to serve well as a mouthpiece tool (当好喉舌工具). This is the most core content of the Marxist View of Journalism, and it is the most fundamental of principles.
Mr. Hu, an ex-newspaper editor and former vice minister of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, was named to top position by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Partyless than two weeks ago, and his rise to the top China’s powerful state television apparatus appears to have precipitated the resurfacing of his past comments on Chinese microbloging sites over the weekend.
