Two academics on Wednesday criticized the German media’s coverage of Chinese news as shallow, but a former German TV correspondent rejected the claims in a debate at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
“They create the impression among German people that any dissident point of view in China is instantly suppressed,” said Thomas Heberer, a political science professor and China specialist at Duisburg University. “That’s the bias.”
Heberer said that hearing about biased and shallow reporting had prompted ordinary Chinese to feel solidarity with the government last year and thus increased the sense of legitimacy of the political elite.
SELECTIVE
“The main problem is that the media are highly selective,” said the other professor, Kai Hafez of Germany’s Erfurt University.
“They don’t report day-to-day politics, but sensational oddities,” he said.
Describing his analysis of reports during unrest in Tibet and the Olympic Games last year, he appealed to German correspondents to interview more ordinary Chinese instead of always calling the same experts, human rights activists or dissidents.
Stefan Niemann, a former Beijing correspondent for ARD public television, rejected the charges, saying reporters for German newspapers and broadcasters were no less fair in China than anywhere else.
“Putting a focus on human rights issues during the Olympic Games was appropriate,” he said.
INTIMIDATION
He said people who spoke to correspondents were often intimidated later by Chinese secret police.
The debate was organized by the Heinrich Boell Foundation, a think tank associated with the German Greens party.
The Berlin foundation commissioned the analysis by Heberer, Hafez and others, using 9,000 reports in German about China last year. A report is to be published at the start of next year.
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