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Zach Swan
ENGL 364
February 9, 2010
Short Essay #1

Google Takes Stand against China

Two oppositional and ever increasing trends have begun to

dominate both the U.S. and global communication media. On one

hand, there has been a widespread commercialization of media

communication that poses a challenge to the social capacity to

generate a democratic culture. On the other hand, newly developed

computer and digital communication technologies are challenging the

ability to control communication in a traditional manner. The most

remarkable development along these lines has been the growth of the

Internet, which permits inexpensive, global, interactive, and mass

computer-to-computer communication, resulting in access to new

information. In any global society, the media system is essential to

political power, but whether that power is exercised depends highly

upon the institutional structure of the system itself. Putting to practice

Robert McChesney’s myth that the news media in the United States is

a “left-wing” bias, one can prove that the American media coverage of

Google’s decision to un-censor content across it Chinese search engine

has a right wing flavor to the reporting style consumed by Americans.

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With Google’s announcement that it will no longer censor its

Chinese search engine along with reconsidering the companies overall

presence in China’s market; Google has taken a bold step, one that few

American International companies have taken, to get on the right side

of media history. The company said it was pushed into this decision by

a sophisticated hacking attack that threatened the privacy of Chinese

human rights activists by attempting to gain access to their Gmail

accounts. The most likely outcome is that Google will lose access to an

important global market, Chinese customers lose access to its search

services, and the Chinese government is left to cover and spin another

story to its people. What’s left after Google’s decision also falls back on

the American mass media outlets that cover and report to the people

what impact this decision will carry on the future of the company’s

international business.

However, this problem seems to go beyond Google. In the last

year, Chinese authorities have blocked YouTube and Facebook,

attempted to force computer retailers to pre-install an advanced

filtering software, pressured Google and other search providers to

further filter racy content, and allegedly launched an attack on

Google that led to the company's services crashing around the world.

“Four years ago when Google entered the Chinese market and

launched Google.cn, Chinese bloggers called it the "neutered

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Google." At the time, Google executives said the decision to bow to

the Chinese government's censorship demands had been made after

heated internal debates,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, author of Google

Gets on the Right Side of History. “They said they had weighed the

positives and negatives and concluded Chinese Internet users were

better off with the neutered Google than with no Google. They drew a

red line under search and said they would not bring any other Google

products containing users' personal information—including email and

blogging—into China. They held to that line” (1). With new

advancements exposing the problem with Chinese media laws and

regulations, journalists are beginning to blanket the American mass

media with coverage that targets specific pathos and logos.

In his most recent book, Robert McChesney addresses some of

the criticisms and barriers to having his viewpoint accepted by

readers. Through his book, The Problem of the Media, McChesney

details these “eight myths” surrounding media while attempting to

address them in order to make the case for democratic media policy

making more conceivable. Of his eight myths, McChesney includes the

case that news media in the United States today is a “left wing” bias.

Traditionally, Left-wingers believe that governments are a force for

social justice and change, and that government should be allowed to

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intervene in individual’s lives to ensure social justice is gained. Right-

wingers, then, believe that governments are ever growing and should

not interfere with people’s lives at all. They believe that government

interference intervenes with an individual’s right to liberty (Day 1). The

Internet has vastly more potential as an engine of democratic

communication, and the real issue at hand is how much of that

potential will be lost because the commercial structures of the media

are both directly and indirectly linked to the policies of the

organizations. The policies currently in place need to be questioned

and tested, and anything found to be detrimental to the greater good

of the society, as a whole, must be discarded in favor of more

reasonable guidelines (Stone 2). With that said, when the coverage of

Google’s decision to no longer censor its Chinese search engine began

in the United States, reporting took a rather right wing approach by

siding with an uncensored search and less government control.

The most interesting of McChesney’s arguments about today’s

liberal American media centered on his analysis of the conservative

critique. The right’s “liberal media” myth has been maintained, in part,

by the flow of conservative rhetoric that focuses attention on

journalists’ social views and away from their economic views. But the

conservative critique is based not only on the proposition that

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journalists’ views are to the left of the general public, but also that

these views influence the news content they produce. It is hard to

deny that this critique serves the interest of an increasingly

conservative mainstream media trying to keep hold of the line

between balance and independence. While this myth attempts to

exposes the right wing stereotype of the liberal journalist, “One should

not replace it with an equally false image that the media is full of

conservative journalist. Like profit-sector professionals in general,

many journalists hold somewhat liberal social views and conservative

economic views. And it’s important to remember that a majority of

journalists identify as ‘centrists’” (McChesney 164).

Using McChesney’s conservative critique, one can see that

journalistic coverage in our society correlates with the sourcing used in

covering social events. The conservative critique of the news media

rests on two general proposals. The first proposition examines the

thought that journalists' views are to the left of the public while the

second examines the way journalist’s frame news content in a way

that accentuates these left perspectives. There are two key problems

with the claim made by the conservative critique. First, it is the

sources, not journalists, who are allowed to express their views in the

conventional model of objective journalism. Therefore, one would learn

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more about the political orientation of news content by looking at

sourcing patterns rather than journalists’ personal views when it comes

to sources, making a liberal bias nonexistent. The use of sourcing to

cement a stance in the Google censorship issue can be seen in the

article Google Gets On the Right Side of History.

“This censored environment makes it easier for the Chinese

government to lie to its people, steal from them, turn a blind eye
when they are poisoned with tainted foodstuffs, and cover up
their children's deaths due to substandard building codes. It is a
constant struggle, and sometimes literally a crime, for people to
share information about such matters or to use the Internet to
mobilize against corruption and malfeasance” (Mackinnon 1).

The use of sources, such as the one above, are used by journalist

to express their particular view to the reader without taking a direct

stance on one side or the other. Second, journalists do not work in

isolation to the outside world. It is important to remember the role of

institutional framework in setting the parameters for the news process.

The large corporations that comprise the major commercial media in

this country tend to favor style and stories that are in line with their

corporate interests, and advertisers (McChesney 133). It is here, at the

structural level, that the fundamental ground rules of news production

are set. Naturally, working journalists sometimes succeed in

temporarily molding some of those rules and boundaries. However,

they will eventually adapt to the rules set by others regardless of their
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personal views. Their adherence to the middle of the road and

conventional journalism is consistent with media outlets owned and

funded by corporations that benefit from the “status quo” and are

threatened by alternative analyses.

“China today is very different from Soviet-era Eastern Europe.

It's unlikely that its current political system—or its system for
blocking foreign Web sites known widely as the "great firewall"—
will crumble like the Berlin Wall any time soon. Both are
supported and enabled by the current geopolitical, commercial
and investment climate in ways that Soviet-era Eastern Europe
and the Iron Curtain never were.

I do believe, however, that in my lifetime the Chinese people

may learn more about some of the conversations that have
taken place over the past decade between Internet company
executives and Chinese authorities. When that happens, they
will know who sold them out and who was most eager to help
the Chinese Communist Party in building a blinkered cocoon of
disinformation around their lives—and in some cases deaths”
(Kristof 2).

In its simplest most effective form, the conservative critique detailed

by McChesney plays off the elitism natural to both professionalism

and to liberalism. In such societies as our own, media are the

principal source of political information and access to public debate

while being the key to an informed and diverse group of citizens.

Throughout his book, Robert McChesney undertook the

challenge of informing the American public of the weaknesses in our

current news media system, pointing out the tools necessary for

productive critique and analysis of our own society. In identifying the

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core problems of the U.S. media system, McChesney chronicled how

a set of eight myths are linked to the commercial structures of the

media all while examining how these same structures are both

directly and indirectly linked to media policies and reporting. When

looked at with the media coverage of censorship issues in China, one

can see that the conservative campaign has meshed comfortably

with both the commercial and political news coverage. In conclusion,

McChesney asserts that it is the media market that will push the

content in a more politically agreeable direction.