New World (Media) Order

What happens when top executives from the world’s most powerful media companies gather in China to discuss the future of journalism? Not much, if press accounts of this week’s World Media Summit in Beijing are any guide.

Top brass from the New York Times, Associated Press, Reuters, BBC and other leading news organizations convened in the Chinese capital for a China-sponsored journalism conference this week. But their discussions made few headlines outside of China. This was the second World Media Summit by China, but it was remarkably quieter than the first, staged here two years ago.

Unlike in 2009, there was no advance notice to non-participating media to attend the event and no guide to press credentials for the uninvited. There was also little news coverage beyond that of China’s state-run news agency Xinhua, despite the apparent newsworthiness of some of the topics. Notably, the world’s media elite discussed how to keep reporters safe in a new global journalism environment. It’s unclear whether China’s status as one of the world’s leading jailer of journalists came up.

The China Media Project in Hong Kong pointed out the unsavory undertone of the event.

"There is of course nothing wrong with global news executives meeting with their Beijing counterparts to discuss business cooperation and exchange," CMP's David Bandurski wrote in an editorial. "The problem here is that news executives are being duped into participating in an institutional framework that is ostensibly “non-governmental [and] non-profit” but which is backed and funded by the Chinese state via its official news agency, and which clearly has agendas beyond simple business exchange that overlap with those of the Chinese leadership."