This week on the Sinica Podcast, Kaiser and Jeremy chat with Mike Chinoy, the legendary award-winning TV newsman who helmed CNN in Beijing for many critical years. Mike talks about the video documentary series and accompanying book Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republic, for which he interviewed about 130 journalists whose careers spanned an 80-year period, from the 1940s to the present.
04:08 – The genesis of the Assignment China project
11:15 – Editorial decisions: What was included, and what wasn’t
16:13 – The big takeaways for Mike on finishing this project
25:13 – The role of contingency and the observer effect
32:52 – How Tiananmen really made CNN and changed the future of cable news
36:30 – Tough ethical calls in the reporting of China
42:42 – Structural biases in American reporting on China…
50:50 – …and what news consumers can do to adjust for those baked-in biases
52:54 – Does where the reporters are actually determine what the story is?
1:02:17 – What went wrong with TV news?
A complete transcript of this podcast is available at TheChinaProject.com.
Recommendations:
Mike: Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai by Matti Friedman
Jeremy: From the Jewish Provinces: Selected Stories by Fradl Shtok, translated by Jordan Finkin and Allison Schachter
Kaiser: Father’s Laszlo Ladany’s “Ten Commandments” on China-watching, and playing around with ChatGPT 4
