DECEMBER 8, 2014 1:00 AMDecember 8, 2014 1:00 am
A newsstand in Beijing. The government is calling for greater attention to ethics in journalism.Credit Rolex Dela Pena/European Pressphoto Agency
The Chinese government appears to have declared war not only on the pollution that dims skies and blackens lungs, but also on another environmental menace: “news smog.”
In this war, morality is the fix, a recent editorial in the state-run People’s Daily suggested. The editorial — titled “Using Morality to Disperse ‘News Smog’” — says that the latest contaminant to afflict Chinese society can be ousted by spending time among the grass roots. There, the article said, a great many people ridicule the “unhealthy phenomenon” that is news reportage and speak of its “moral decline” as well as its “soulless click-through rate.”
So how to purify the soul? How to bolster morality?
According to the editorial, which ran last week, a firm Communist Party hand will guide the media industry into a “cold and bright space.”
Last year, a News Morality Committee was established in an effort to rectify the morals of media employees whose “souls” have apparently departed. The editorial said that in Zhejiang Province, a “negative list” of news-industry morals was recently circulated to strengthen external supervision of newspapers, and the government in Hebei Province recently invited “societal supervisors” to reduce the number of reports related to “celebrities,” things that don’t seem right — and sex.
In particular, the editorial said that the committee would aim to safeguard Chinese people’s health by driving away the four big elements of journalistic “pollution,” listed as: false news, paid-for news, vulgarity and unhealthy ads.
The committee, which falls under the Communist Party’s central propaganda department, has already spread its scope to 16 provinces and has been tasked with strengthening the news ranks and resolving problems arising from news coverage, as well as fostering the “healthy” development of the news industry.
