Dialogue, Just Like Sharks

I don't often blog about television, for the obvious reason that I don't watch much. Probably I could learn a lot from watching Chinese language television on a regular basis--a lot of Chinese, I mean--but I can't bring myself to do it. It's not that I can't follow what's going on. It's just that I can't drum up sufficient interest in the programming.

Then there's the English-language channel, CCTV 9. By and large, I don't like watching that either. For the most part, the information flow is to slow, because announcers who are non-native English speakers take a painstaking long time to get to the end of relatively simple and obvious sentences. Occasionally, though, I chance upon the political news discussion show Dialogue. For some reason, I find this show really fun to watch.

For a country that doesn't have much freedom of the press, the show is remarkably free of bullshit, a lot freer than television news in the US as far as I can see.

Then, the guests that they have doing the actual discussing are intellectuals, generally university professors of political science visiting Beijing, clearly people who are intelligent and stay up on current affairs but yet probably aren't in the pay of anybody, at least no one with a controlling interest. They're usually politically left-to-moderate, and the perspective they offer is refreshing.

Not to say that the show is the most sophisticated piece of political analysis you'll ever see. I kind of like it because it's not all that sophisticated. Tonight it was the resignation of Paul Wolfowitz from the World Bank, a news item that wasn't really even on my radar. But I learned quite a bit about it in the half hour I spent watching the show. The questions asked by the Chinese host were entertaining too. Is the call for his resignation a media crusade against him? Political revenge for his role in the Iraq war? Is the spate of resignations of top figures going to affect the future of the Neo-Cons? (Neo-Cons is a word I have only heard on this particular news show, but they do like to use it!) And the girlfriend he was giving money to, is she going to break up with him? Who's going to replace him? Is there a chance it could be Tony Blair? (One of the guests on the show, a young Irishman, answers with a resounding no.) What is Paul's political future? Is his reputation completely destroyed? (I wonder: in China, would he have been executed? I mean, if he'd've been fingered in the first place, of course.) How does he compare with Robert McNamara? And so forth.

Resounding conclusion: the host suggests that there is a sort of "media carnivore", a happy coinage based, presumably, on a Chinese mishearing of the word "media carnival"? Someone offstage is heard to burst out in muffled laughter. The Irishman runs with it and says, why yes, it does seem like the media smells blood and senses weakness, then moves in for the kill. "Yes," says the television host serenely, and without any apparent trace of irony, "the media are just like sharks."

Hilariously un-self-conscious? or ultra-subtle, ultra-self-conscious?

That's the thing about China, you just never can tell.