There's no such thing as the 'Western Media'

• Source: Global Times
• [23:11 November 23 2009]
• Comments

By Matt Dalton

A lot of major news events have happened in China over the last couple of years. Some are good and some are not..However, when news agencies from abroad report on the stories, they are often looked upon by many Chinese as biased and/or anti-Chinese. They lump all coverage together as "the Western media."

But a closer look shows that nothing could be further from the truth..

One of the fi rst mistakes that some Chinese make when criticizing a story is labeling the story as "Western." In reality, however, the story could be labeled as such so long as it is not from a Chinese source..

Japanese, Korean, or Indian stories that displease some Chinese readers are immediately called "Western," when anybody who took 4th grade geography knows that they are not.. So where does this label come from, and why are so many using it so freely?.

One possibility could be China's history.. In schools, many Chinese learn that they have often been the victim and never the aggressor – there is no mention of China's historical invasions of some neighboring countries – and that, far too often, the aggressor has been from the West..

The lessons of the Opium War, Sino- French war, and the unequal treaties China was forced to sign are just of the few humiliations the West brought upon China in the past..For some, despite all the prosperity that has come to China and the West by cooperating, they believe Western countries still look to humiliate China today, no longer by treaties or the barrel of a gun, but by making it lose face in the media.

What many of these people don't understand is that reporting something bad isn't biased, but reality. The motive of a good reporter is to report the story as they see it, not to make China or any other person or place lose or gain face.

On top of that, anyone familiar with European or US media knows that the political range within newspapers, television, and other agencies is immense.

It's absurd to lump organizations as diverse as the UK's staunchly liberal Guardian newspaper and the US's Republican-boosting Fox News together as one amorphous entity called "the Western Media."