China Cracking Down on State Media: Stop Reporting ‘Wrong Points of View’

With plenty of debates about media bias in the United States, it’s important to keep things in perspective: at least it’s nowhere near as bad as the Chinese media clampdown. The Chinese government is attempting to tighten its control on state media, releasing new guidelines ordering official news outlets to avoid “wrong points of view” and instead promote “socialist values” in their news stories instead.

There have been concerns recently of state media outlets not being in lockstep with the Communist Party, and so a list of guidelines was sent out and published by state news agency Xinhua.

Under new guidelines to enforce “core socialist values”, the media must “steadfastly uphold the correct guidance of public opinion”.

“Strengthen the management of the media, do not provide channels for the propagation of the wrong points of view…

“News and publishing organs and those who work in the industry must strengthen self-regulation, and earnestly increase their sense of responsibility and ability to promote core socialist values,” it added.

One of China’s state newspapers recently wrote an editorial calling for a tighter stranglehold on foreign journalists reporting from within China in order to contain “information security,” and Chinese state media recently took on what it described as a “new form of cultural aggression”: Battlefield 4.

[photo via Shutterstock]

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Follow Josh Feldman on Twitter: @feldmaniac

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