Public Please

Today, I had the good fortune to attend a lecture on NGOs and civil society in China by Nick Young. As a journalist in China, Nick provided detailed coverage of the emerging non-governmental organization sector in China. He unpacked some of the tensions between the grassroot NGOs and, what he calls, the “corporatist” and “imperial” Chinese government. He argued that political rule in China is largely fractured into little bureaucratic fiefdoms, and that there is often very little communication between the various layers of government. The people at the bottom, such as rural villagers, are often at the mercy of the personalities of their local officials. He claimed some local officials were “saints” and others were “sinners”, and that because of the hierarchical power structure in China, those with corrupt officials had very little legal recourse. Nick claimed that some of the most successful NGOs recognized the gaps in communication between government authorities and tried to fill those gaps.

After the lecture, a young Chinese man (let’s call him Tom) asked Nick his thoughts about how the Western media distorted its coverage of the Chinese government’s recent reactions to the protests in Tibet. Tom claimed that the Western media misrepresented the violence in Tibet. Tom claimed that CNN and other Western media news outlets misrepresented China as an oppressive aggressor against the Tibetan people. According to Tom, CNN showed videos of Nepalese police beating Tibetans as they described China’s crackdown on the Tibetans, thereby confusing Nepalese violence with Chinese violence.

Tom also claimed that the Tibetans slaughtered some Chinese with “long knives”, that they locked some Chinese girls in a hut and set fire to it, and other acts of terrible violence. I’m not sure if any of this is true. I am sure that many people have very different perceptions of what is going on in Tibet. I know that manipulating images can reframe a news story. Cropping, resequencing, and recoloring images can profoundly change its apparent meaning. With respect to the Tibet-China conflict, we probably have violence on many fronts. It’s not necessarily equal violence on each side, but the media typically bifurcates the argument into two positions, and like lawyers for their clients, these images often distort the truth for just causes.

Nick provided the example of the Dying Rooms (watch it here ), where several British filmmakers took hidden cameras into the orphanages of China and then created a documentary purporting the existence of dying rooms, where Chinese children are left to die. The documentary is extremely disturbing. Clearly, Chinese children are suffering. Killing and torturing children in this fashion is anathema, and those events should be documented, admonished, and prevented.

While many of the images do not lie, the devil is in the details, in how these media artifacts reframe history, a projected history which in many cases, may have never occurred. Did most Chinese orphanages have dying rooms for little girls? Probably not. The documentary showcased torture, neglect, and murder, sins of both commission and omission. Girls were probably mistreated more than boys, but many boys also suffered tremendously. In many ways, the orphanages depicted were dying rooms, but not just for girls and not solely for the purpose of killing the children. The documentary was intended to save the children, a just cause, but it distorted the media, media which was already sufficient to make its case without those distortions.

Similarly, increased autonomy for the people of Tibet is a just cause, and the means to that end also matter. The medium by which we make the case for change must also do justice to the events which they oppose. As a method of persuasion, we are often tempted to exaggerate the truth, and distort the media, either through theatric gesticulation or an inflected voice or general terms that ignore the hairy exceptions. What does it mean to distort our media for just causes? Are we doing more than lying when we fabricate the past? I think the case can be made that media manipulation remakes reality. By reframing fiction as fact, we often experience its effects as if it were a fact. On what else besides the media can we base our beliefs about experiences we do not directly encounter? And with what else besides media can we move closer to directly experience that past and distant present?

We are not too far from Plato’s cave, even as we watch the drama unfold in the shadows of China and Tibet. Even Tom and Nick, who feel the heat, are not that close to the fire. It bears repeating, again and again and again: the media matters. Media shapes our beliefs. Our beliefs motivate our actions. Our actions shape the media. Since media production is integral to all action, we must be careful how we produce media. If we are to have any ethical knowledge, it must address the media. Media ethics is not a rare species of prescription, but at the heart of metaethics. Whether we crop this region from the picture, or crop this ethnic minority from political power, we are presupposing similar general ethical statements about our media experience. If the means matter for just ends, then the media matters for just causes.