Journal of Australia-China Affairs 2014

In Search of Common Ground: Australia and China’s News MediaBill Birtles Bill Birtles is a journalist with the ABC’s Asia Pacific News Centre in Melbourne, specialising in North-­‐East Asia, and a former editorial staffer at Xinhua News Agency’s international television division in Beijing. He was part of the Australian delegation that took part in a journalist exchange forum organised by the Australian Embassy in Beijing in June 2014. On a humid Beijing summer’s afternoon in late June, six Chinese journalists sat along one side of a table littered with cups of tea and sweet biscuits in the air-­‐conditioned cocoon of the Australian Embassy. Sitting opposite were five Australian counterparts, notepads and pens at the ready, tentatively awaiting the premier event of their whirlwind six-­‐day tour of China. With the clock ticking past 4pm, it fell to a consular official to kick proceedings off and explain to everyone present what they were actually there for. And with the reigns handed over to the participants of this ‘journalists dialogue’, the Chinese side proceeded one by one to introduce their respective media outlets. Forty-­‐five minutes later they had finished, and I noticed we had almost used up half of the allocated time for discussion without a single question being asked. The Australian side then raced through our introductions so as to allow for enough time to get down to the nitty gritty of the big issues. And before long, we were discussing them. This meeting was not the first time journalists had sat down face to face to ‘exchange ideas’ relating to their field. The template had been set by a similar get together the previous year organised by the Asia Pacific Journalism Centre and the All China Journalists Association. By multiple accounts that session turned a bit testy when an Australian journalist probed about how the system of censorship actually works in a Chinese newsroom. This time around, the tone of the discussion remained good natured. The Australian contingent of five relatively young reporters from print and television had been pre-­‐warned that the Chinese journalists had likely been handpicked to deliver a few key messages from the Foreign Ministry, and that a more relaxed discussion may flow, along with a few refreshing Yanjing beers, at the dinner afterwards. A suggestion was offered from a representative of the Economic Daily that the Australian media create a positive environment for discussion of the Free Trade Agreement with China. And a Xinhua reporter who had previously spent time in the Sydney bureau turned the discussion to the topic of bias in the Western media, recalling the tone of coverage in the Australian press during the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games torch relay. As a journalist who had spent more than a year as a young reporter working in one of the major newsrooms of the Xinhua News Agency, this passionate claim to unfair treatment at the hands of the Western media was nothing new. On my first day at Xinhua’s imposing headquarters in Beijing’s south-­‐western district of Xuanwumen, several colleagues questioned me about it within a moment of shaking my hand and welcoming me to the office. If anything, it was surprising that with six years and two Olympic Games having passed, the torch relay was still proffered as an example. JOURNAL OF AUSTRALIA-CHINA AFFAIRS 127