Lynne Joiner
Shorenstein Reports on Contemporary East Asia
Number 12
November 1996
The 1996-97 Shorenstein Seminars on Contemporary East Asia presented a public lecture on "Shanghai Television: News and Propaganda" by Lynne Joiner on Thursday, November 7, 1996 at the Institute of East Asian Studies.
Lynne Joiner is an award winning broadcast journalist and documentary producer. She recently returned from a seven-month-long assignment as news consultant for Shanghai Television (STV), where she helped established its new English-language International Broadcasting Service. Over the course of her career, Ms. Joiner has covered many major events in U.S.-China relations. Her assignments include work for CNN, CBS, ABC as well as Bay Area TV stations. She created and hosted "Foreign Exchange," a weekly call-in program on world affairs for NPR stations. Currently Ms. Joiner is working for the Communications Division of the Port of Oakland.
The visions of China that Lynne Joiner shared in her presentation on the seven months she spent as a consultant for the fledgling English-language news department at Shanghai Television (STV) came from a perspective few foreign visitors are able to enjoy: that of life inside China's "propaganda machine." She spoke of the exciting challenges and frustrations she experienced as an American-trained reporter working in an environment where "journalists are the throat and the voice of the party" and of the strides and setbacks in broadcasting over the past two decades in China.
STV operates two channels and reaches a potential audience of 100 million viewers in the Yangxi River Basin. STV now has 1,000 employees in its six divisions. STV recently acquired an interest in the Shanghai Animation Studios. In addition to news, the station produces game shows, historical dramas, and variety shows and acquires 500 hours of foreign programs a year.
News shows broadcast in Chinese are the highest-rated shows (ratings are based upon diaries filled in by selected viewers) and are the station's most important money maker. STV broadcasts news at 7:00 A.M., noon, 3:00 P.M., 6:30 P.M., 7:00 P.M., and 9 P.M. (inter-national).The Chinese news staff numbers 120, including 27 reporters, 5 editors-in-chief, 12 cameramen, a news director, and 3 deputy news directors who work in twenty-four hour shifts and live in a dormitory at the station while on duty. The reporters cover regular beats. In addition to the STV staff, China's large factories have their own reporters who are expected to send in stories about their industries.
Advertising rates are rising. Thirty seconds of advertising costs $4,000 on the 7:00 P.M. show. In 1994 it cost $2,500. Foreign companies pay 10 to 20 percent extra for ads, but the gap is closing. Joint ventures now count as domestic companies. Ads are sold on a yearly basis through a hundred advertising companies.
Joiner's first contact with STV was in 1983 when she was host to a Shanghai delegation on a "sister city" visit to San Francisco. The exchange led to further collaborations between STV and San Francisco's KPIX. In 1986, Joiner provided programming for and led a delegation to Shanghai's first sister city international television festival.
She described the atmosphere of China at that time as amazingly open. Even a documentary about the "People Power Revolution" and the overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines was aired on STV. Four hours of foreign programming were shown on two channels every night to an audience of 60 million viewers. STV began to air five minutes of English-language news reports, and Joiner got KPIX to donate an English language typewriter built for use with a teleprompter to the station. She worked with the news anchors and coached them in using the teleprompter, setting the foundation for her return to Shanghai ten years later.
In 1987, Joiner took a youth soccer delegation to Shanghai to play exhibition games and looks back fondly on this last trip to Shanghai before the Tiananmen demonstrations. Joiner lost contact with STV after the crackdown on the student demonstrations in 1989. She didn't hear from STV again until June 1995, when the station invited her to China. The China that Joiner returned to was vastly different from what she had first seen twenty years before. In 1975, Joiner saw factory motors and turbines in the window displays of Shanghai's biggest department stores, billboards "denouncing capitalist roaders as 'the ninth stinking class of purgatory,'" and buildings of European architecture standing "dark and dingy . . . like ghosts" along the Bund.
When she returned to Shanghai in September 1995, the factory motors in store windows had been replaced by lingerie and mini-skirts. Billboards advertised Marlboro cigarettes and Courvoisier Cognac. High-rises had emerged with more coming in a constant flurry of construction. The city she described was "no longer frozen in time -- it was on the move, twenty-four hours a day." She noted that 18 percent of the world's cranes are at work in Shanghai alone.
She described the new 24-story high-rise, called the International News Exchange Center, that now houses international media organizations like Bloomberg News and CNBC and that boasts a four-story-high TV screen on the front of the building that displayed sporting events and programs. Once, she even saw a San Francisco 49ers football game on the big screen.
The 10th-floor offices of the IBS section of STV were equipped with TV monitors and staff computers that gave the appearance of a smoothly run operation. Joiner said that there were many similarities to an American newsroom, including a "handsome anchor who spent all afternoon reading and fixing his hair."
But not everything about the building was in working order, Joiner noted. Fifty percent of the news at IBS came from CNN feeds that were captured by a satellite dish on top of the building. The feeds were fed to a downlink room built on the roof, so accessing the information meant a trip up the elevator to the 19th floor, a walk through a long corridor to another elevator that ran up to the 24th floor, another walk through another corridor, and a climb up the stairs to the uplink room. These experiences helped Joiner come back with the conclusion that, often in China, "nothing is as easy or convenient as it could be." It wasn't until two months after Joiner arrived that a technician finally wired the 10th floor so the walks became unnecessary. Joiner pointed out differences in the IBS approach to news production. For instance, Joiner said the news was taped, not broadcast live. The IBS news team did not have a teleprompter; that equipment was reserved for the Chinese-language news department. A 20-minute show often took an hour to record because of delays caused when the anchors, who had to memorize their lead-ins, botched their lines or when the technical staff made errors.
Still, through Joiner's eyes one got a sense of Shanghai's exponential growth.
Joiner stressed her relationship with the people at STV. The news staff consisted of 15-20 young employees, many of whom were English majors freshly recruited out of college. Most were between the ages of 21 and 30. Only a few had prior TV experience. Joiner helped them get started by teaching them two hours of basic broadcast journalism a week. Overseeing the staff were a supervisor, a producer, and an IBS senior executive that Joiner had known since the mid-1980s.
She shared some of her journal entries, detailing her struggle to reach agreements of news judgment with the supervisor, who had the responsibility of censoring the newscast's content. She wrote of one incident: "[The supervisor] must always check on which way the political wind is blowing. When the show was running long one night, he cut a CNN story on European protests about French nuke testing -- I think because China also is testing. I chuckled because, fortunately, the headline I wrote and the video tease showing thousands in the streets of Brussels got on the air before the full news story got axed."
Joiner said the newscast would always start with a story about the actions of China's top leaders, which wasn't always the most important story of the day. It was difficult to defeat arbitrary censorship, especially whenever the supervisor took control of the video-editing machine. She learned that for certain issues, particularly ones of national or international importance, STV had to sit on stories until Beijing signaled approval. The young journalists had no tradition of an independent press or freedom of speech. A story about Yitzhak Rabin's funeral could not air until Beijing's station first aired its version. She realized the difficult role the supervisor played, for a wrong move on his part could very well mean the loss of his job.
Caution sometimes prevailed on seemingly light subjects as well. Joiner said she almost quit STV over a story about a five-star hotel's Thanksgiving dinner. The supervisor cut the story, which Joiner had framed as an "international food cultural event" rather than an American holiday. Meetings with the director elicited polite apologies for killing the story but a firm stand that the story was not appropriate. Joiner said she was told that "it took five years to get the green light to start IBS. Jiang Zemin is aware of the experiment and it is being closely watched. IBS is in a very forward position and must be careful."
Joiner stayed on, and her insight into the role IBS played in China grew. She saw STV as a "microcosm of China's struggle with itself as the Communist Party tries to hold on to control while more parts of the country seek more independence." Although there was an undercurrent of tension, Joiner said both sides adapted.
Joiner's experience at STV gave her a unique view of Sino-American relations and of media misperceptions on both sides. She said that "Sino-American relations are too important and too complex to be wrapped up in animosity and misperceptions which are fed by occasionally unbalanced reporting of sensational issues." Joiner cited population pressure as an example of an issue that needs greater understanding. She said that "the average Chinese is much better off than at any time in the past hundred and fifty years, [but] the pressure of population remains a significant fact that we in the West often forget must be factored into every decision in China."
She said that the director of IBS hopes to create an entirely international channel by the year 1998 and has invited her to return to help.
Summarized by Sarah Yang.
