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Shoppers in supermarkets across Europe will soon get the rare "treat" of watching short broadcasts from Xinhua while picking out their groceries.
In a bizarre choice of expansion strategies, everyone's favorite news source (besides Shanghaiist) has announced that it will begin short 90-minute English broadcasts inside select European supermarkets in order to improve the country's image and media influence abroad.
Xinhua's announcement is just one of several expansions of the Chinese government's recent 45 billion Yuan effort to expand its influence both domestically and internationally in recent times. After the unveiling of an English version of the Global Times and the expansion of The People's Daily's international coverage, it comes as no surprise that Xinhua would get its chance to hook a new audience as well.
The question, though, is what China intends to actually do with its expanded media coverage. The central government's 45 billion Yuan program is first and foremost a response to negative international media coverage of the Olympics, so one would assume that the newly expanded Xinhua is simply intended to provide a better-harmonized version of the news abroad.
As the Shanghai Expo looms only 309 days away (in case you forgot), it is possible that this is China's attempt at preventing a firestorm of negative international press similar to last year's pre-Olympics coverage.
We're also still a bit puzzled by Xinhua's choice of media outlets and it seems like we're not the only ones.
Last we checked, grocery stores are not at the top of most peoples' lists of most trusted news sources, or places where they would stop to watch tv. Perhaps it is just Xinhua trying to enter a market with seemingly untapped demand... and maybe not realizing that the reason its untapped is because the demand isn't there.
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Good for them. China needs real good PR consultants to spin and coach them on the skills that Washington have mastered.
And those "good" PR consultants would work for Xinhua? Hehehe
Sure, why not? Or else google and yahoo won't be doing business in China. LOL!
BBC1: Europeans hate Americans almost as much as they hate brown people & Jews.
Of course they do. They are the most hypocratic people in the world. Afterall, they invented colonialism, communism and nazism.
I collected this from the comments page of Simon Elegant's blog on Time Magazine. He got grilled real bad.
"The term "democracy and freedom" is the most abused phrase in human history. Remember the American Revolution war? It was for democracy and freedom although 8% of the people were slaves at the time in America. Both sides of the American Civil War claimed to fight for freedom and democracy. Colonization and annexation of a country called Hawaii was also done in the name of freedom and democracy. Those terms were also used by both sides of the two world wars. Japanese claimed that they started world war II for the democracy and freedom of Asian countries colonized by Europeans. I just wish Western Media stop using the term to justify whatever their government does to other countries
I clearly remember just a couple of months ago when India held its month-long election which killed, according to BBC, over 100 people in the process, mainstream Western media such as BBC used the term the "Largest Democracy in the World" to describe India. The tone was "bravo!!!". Ok, so India is the largest democracy in the world due to its population and also due to the fact that its runs elections.
But what about Iran? Nobody calls Iran a democracy even though it also run elections. Only when the dispute on the election results erupted did western media become excited and started to carry out their duty to promote democracy by supporting ... certainly ... the opposition party.
And we also remember not too long ago in 2006, Palestine also ran a legislative election and Hamas won. Well, nobody in the West seemed to be interested in defending the democratic value by respecting the election results. On the contrary, since Hamas is considerrd a terrorist group, sanctions were therefore imposed by many Western countries to voice their disapproval of the election results and the choice of the Palestinian people.
So, it appears to me the so-called democracy must serve a purpose. When democracy can be used as a moral weapon to fight against a regime like the CCP of China, democracy is a so-called universal value (so India is a democracy and China is not); but when a democratic process did not produce the results the West wishes to see, then democracy is not a universal value again. Instead, the interest of a nation or a group of nations prevail and the results of the democratic process are rejected. And the Western media, who usually see themselves as the defender of the democratic value, remain silent. In fact, the focus of their reports is shift to analyzing the national or collective interest, while completely ignoring that their national or collective interest is infact at odds with the democratic value they are supposed to defend.
So, this inconsistency makes the Western media look extremely hypocratic in the eyes of the many outside of the so-called Western world.
Of course, to many so-called Western journalists. This world outside of the Western world simply does not exist. So when they say "the whole world is... blah, blah, blah", they actually mean the "Western world", which, in terms of the population, is in fact the minority of the world not the majority."
"90-minute English broadcasts inside select European supermarkets"
I hope they didn't confuse the European countries with the english-speaking European countries.
It's absolutely enlightenning for Europeans not to be spooned always by only few nannis and to know thy truth exists in BBC plus Xinhua divides two.
Obviously it should be "spoonfed"
Europeans will be whoremoanized by the soft tones of the CCP, reminding them that China is a peaceful country and only a rising power that should be treated with respect and given lots of technology and money because it is a developing country and yet finds enough spare change in the couch for a manned space program, an aircraft carrier and a fleet of AIP submarines as well as having over half of all African officials in its pocket.
I can well imagine how these Chinese "manned space program, an aircraft carrier and a fleet of AIP submarines" made you mad and assure you there will be more to your nightmare.