Press freedom: China may have too little but America has far too much

Authoritarian China has to loosen its grip to allow for a freer press. In the US, however, unchecked freedom has led to a crisis of authority and undermined the fourth estate’s capacity for fair and balanced reporting

Peter T. C. Chang

Published: 1:30am, 22 Oct 2021

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LinkedIn’s retreat from China once again underscores the challenging environment that US social media faces in the country. If China is too restrictive, the United States faces the inverse problem of an environment so free that it is complicating the US media’s ability to maintain fair and balanced reporting.

This month, a Facebook whistle-blower’s testimony to US lawmakers leaves the social media giant once again facing a congressional threat to break it up. At the heart of Facebook’s long-standing saga is the question of authority.

Disdainful of state power, Americans are adamant about keeping the government out of their lives. In the tech industry, for example, corporate giants such as Facebook and Google operate freely, barely impeded by regulation. Guided by the conviction that free speech is the best antidote to hate speech, these social media platforms have enforced little censorship.

But America’s unbridled faith in freedom has unintended consequences: US social media is now awash with misinformation and conspiracy theories.

One peculiar episode from this disarray is how Donald Trump, at the time the country’s most powerful elected public official, was accused of falsehood and censored by Twitter, an unelected private entity. It underscored the crisis of authority afflicting America; that is, who is the final arbiter of right and wrong?

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In China, where the country is conceived as the family writ large, the masses are accustomed to the paternalistic state’s imprint on everyday life, including freedom of speech. The recent crackdown on Chinese tech titans, for instance, is clearly Beijing’s attempt to prevent any American-style “unruly freedom” from taking root.

But an orderly, authoritarian China is anathema to Western liberal democracies. After decades of reform, the Chinese state under President Xi Jinping is tightening the space for contested ideologies.

This has resulted in Beijing and Washington engaging in tit-for-tat restrictions and expulsions of journalists. The reduced presence of international media is a setback for more transparent reporting on China and a better understanding of the country.

That said, the US press corps’ credibility as an independent, impartial critic of China has come under increased scrutiny. In America, there is a clear bipartisan consensus that Communist Party-ruled China poses imminent threats to the US. Some have depicted these threats in civilisational terms; that is, China represents radically different belief systems incompatible with Western values.

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Truth be told, China’s failure is in not fitting into a theological world view where America is the shining city on a hill. And, regrettably, US mainstream media by and large have taken in this pseudo-religious conviction of America’s indisputable primacy.

A central tenet of ethical journalism is to retain an open mind and question every assumption in pursuit of the truth. As the fourth estate, the media have a vital role in providing checks and balances for the various branches of government.

Yet, on China, US news outlets mostly march to Washington’s drumbeat of containing and confronting its Asian rival. In US media coverage of the Wuhan lab leak controversy, for instance, there was a strong suggestion of presumption of guilt.

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Today’s persistently anti-China news broadcasts bear a disturbing parallel with US cable news networks’ role in propagating the unfounded claims of weapons of mass destruction during the build-up to the American invasion of Iraq.

The prelude to the Iraq war was, of course, the September 11 tragedy. The New York Twin Towers attack shifted the post-Cold-War narrative from the “end of history” to the “clash of civilisations”.

In his 2002 State of the Union address, president George W. Bush’s invocation of the “axis of evil” recast America’s mission to liberate the world as a battle of good vs evil. Today, China finds itself on the wrong side of this Manichaean world view.

This binary world view is also tearing the US apart. Fractured along racial and cultural, political and religious lines, Americans are locking horns to defend their respective versions of the American way of life, in an ever more hostile conflict that the religious right is framing as a battle between the forces of light and darkness.

How long can the Democrats hold back America’s far-right tide?

Last month marked the 20th anniversary of the World Trade Centre collapse. But the aftermath of September 11 is being overtaken by a new crisis, the January 6 Capitol insurrection. The battle to overcome evil, first waged outside America, has spread inside.

Unfortunately, the US media has also become entangled in this cultural war, as liberal and conservative cable news networks battle it out, denouncing each other for propagating un-American values. Facebook, for example, is accused of complicity in the January 6 storming of the Capitol, among other allegations.

Unlike China, where the battle lines are drawn between the state and media, in the US, a civil war has broken out within the ranks, as news agencies and media corporations turn on one another. A fractured fourth estate is another sign of a fragile democracy in danger of failing.

Authoritarian China has to loosen its grip to allow for a freer press. In America, however, unchecked freedom has led to a crisis of authority and undermined the fourth estate’s capacity for fair and balanced reporting.

US media must find a way out of its internal strife and regain the impartiality needed to heal the polarised republic. More importantly, American journalism must reject the binary world view that denigrates other civilisation powers such as China. Failure to do so will risk repeating the Iraq war mistake and, this time, the consequences could be far more tragic.

Peter T.C. Chang is deputy director of the Institute of China Studies, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia