Ben Smith, The New York Times
Published: 10 May 2021 11:43 AM BdST
Updated: 10 May 2021 11:44 AM BdST A giant screen shows news footage of Chinese President Xi Jinping attending a video summit on climate change with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron, at a shopping street in Beijing, China April 16, 2021. REUTERS
In the fall of 2019, just before global borders closed, an international journalists’ association decided to canvass its members about a subject that kept coming up in informal conversations: What is China doing? );
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What it found was astonishing in its scope. Journalists from countries as tiny as Guinea-Bissau had been invited to sign agreements with their Chinese counterparts. The Chinese government was distributing versions of its propaganda newspaper China Daily in English and also Serbian. A Filipino journalist estimated that more than half of the stories on a Philippines newswire came from the Chinese state agen
The report is based on an original survey that polled 54 journalist unions from 50 different countries and territories. The survey probed the extent of China’s global media outreach in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. The report notes, “
Beijing has managed to parlay the pandemic into positive coverage for its handling of the new coronavirus. Globally, 56 per cent of all countries reported that coverage of China in their country had become more positive overall since the Covid-19 outbreak, while only 24 per cent said coverage of China had become more negative. The percentage of respondents reporting memoranda of understanding (MOUs) with Chinese bodies remained stable at around one-third, with several respondents remarking that travel bans had frozen negotiations regarding media agreements.”
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