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A NOISY transpacific storm has blown up, starring the Chinese Foreign Ministry and CNN. That's a superpower squall if ever there was one. But it's hard to know for whom to root!
The story so far: Some Chinese officials and many Chinese on the mainland are steamed over Western media coverage of the Tibet demonstrations. Their complaint (and a whole lot of people elsewhere in Asia agree) is the usual Asian moan about the Western media: that it portrays world events that are inherently complicated, nuanced and sensitive as if they were simple black-and-white morality plays. When will we ever learn that the more accurate coloration is almost always a shade or two of grey?
And so Asian anger - on a low simmer - absolutely boiled over the other day when a CNN opinion commentator offered unflattering remarks about China and its tainted food exports and its policy towards Tibet. The last line of the aired commentary was this: 'I think they're basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they've been for the last 50 years.'
Beijing in effect called for something approaching Mr Jack Cafferty's immediate guillotining, without sedation. In response, CNN issued a sort of half-baked, conditional apology: 'It was not Mr Cafferty's nor CNN's intent to cause offence to the Chinese people, and we would apologise to anyone who has interpreted the comments in this way.' CNN added that its columnist was merely offering his 'strongly held' opinion of 'the Chinese government, not China's people'. Unfortunately, that 'apology' hit many Chinese as insincere.
There is something else that's unfortunate: Mr Jack Cafferty himself. To know him may be to love him, and many do, especially for his taxicab-driver-style rudeness. But if you don't know him, and you think of CNN as a serious, sensible, objective and internationally respected news organisation, you would probably be wondering why they would have on the air an 'opinion commentator' who's a cross between an insult comic and a one-person prejudice machine.
Jack the Hack once memorably opined of an effort in the US Congress to ban gay marriages: 'This is all being done by the Republican majority in an effort to appeal to right-wing nuts in the Republican Party...Ignore all of the pressing issues facing the country, and instead go grovel at the feet of the lunatic fringe.' Moderation in the pursuit of balance is not Cafferty's game.
Personally, I sort of dig his in-your-face, chalk-on-a-blackboard brand of irreverence. The reason perhaps is that I lived in New York City for decades. That thoroughly inured me to rudeness and overt prejudice. Practically everyone in New York is an equal-opportunity insulter: No ethnic, gender or race group is exempt.
But if I am running a serious media organisation, I'd put that kind of stuff on some cable comedy show. It's too easily misunderstood.
And the fact that Mr Cafferty is widely misunderstood across Asia is no reason to excuse the fact that CNN offered him the bullhorn on an issue like this. The road to the Olympics is obviously going to be bumpy enough without CNN throwing firecrackers into the street. You might say that China has to learn and accept that US media culture is very different from theirs, that Mr Cafferty spoke for no one but himself, and that half the things people sometimes say in the US media they may not even believe themselves, they do it just for effect.
But the truth is that the nation of China doesn't have to learn anything unless it wants to. In the meantime perhaps the West needs to learn more about China - how it will think and how it will react to what we say and do.
Perhaps by being more cosmopolitan about them, they will become more cosmopolitan about us. Communication at its best is always a two-way street.
The writer is a professor of communication and policy studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
This article was first published in The Straits Times on April 18, 2008
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