One down (almost)

One down, the rest to go

The spring semester in China starts late by Western standards—late February—and also ends late—early July. This, of course, accommodates the Chinese New Year activities, which last for almost two weeks earlier in the winter. It also provides a good balance—the winter and summer breaks aren’t quite equal, but are close to it—six weeks, give or take a little. So! What does this mean? Most of my classes don’t finish for another month. The one exception is my news class, a short class that meets for only ten weeks. It is a foreign language class—English—and the students enrolled in it are all double majors, some graduating with physics degrees, some with environmental science degrees, all different kinds of degrees. Our exam is Friday, the 6^th.

So it is a curious thing. What do I teach in a class like this? What should I focus on the first week in June? As I write, it is actually two days before the 6^th of June, a day that is not insignificant in the history of China. Even though this class is not my main preparation, I have loved teaching it—partly because I’m a news junkie, I suppose—partly because teaching news literacy is one of the best ways I know to teach critical thinking. It is also of paramount importance in the digital age, a time when we find ourselves swimming in information—but—just what kind of information? Reader beware! No matter what country we might live in, the burden is on us as readers more than ever to read thoughtfully and critically.  That’s true for all of us all around the globe.

So what am I thinking about this week? And what am I allowed to say? My own organization, Peace Corps, follows the “when in Rome do as the Romans do” philosophy and forbids us Peace Corps volunteers to make reference to any of the “three T’s”—so that is something I bear in mind when teaching this class. One of my colleagues, an American contract teacher who is not a Peace Corps volunteer, was just reprimanded and had a job reassignment because he did get in a discussion with some students about one of them, arguably the least controversial.

One thing that is natural to do in a news class such as this is to compare news coverage on any given day—what is the BBC saying? The Guardian? China Daily? Al Jazeera? Der Spiegel? The New York Times? And so on. This enables us to ask questions not only about accuracy and truthfulness, but also about the rhetorical situation—Who is the author? Who is the audience? What is included, excluded, and for what purpose, in what the context? How are the sources handled? Not only how many—but what kind? Can they be checked? And so on. Below is a screen shot of the front pages of several newspapers. 

I would not be allowed to focus on the front page of some of these papers today (say the WSJ)  because Peace Corps would not allow me to mention some of the top stories. So I don’t. I don’t try to touch on every possible issue—and I don’t meet my next class until June 6^th, anyway, which will have different stories.

We spend lots of time looking at news from cross-cultural perspectives—and anyone’s own country almost always looks awful through the lens of another country. That’s because what is considered “news” usually isn’t pretty—especially any “news” that jumps oceans and national borders. Another way to put it is that our own countries tend to demonize others—not that we are untruthful, but we selectively focus on the negative. I think the coverage of China in the NYT is unrelentlingly harsh.

My students have had lots to say about US spying on China and elsewhere. They have lots of opinions about Snowden. They have not read—in fact, most have no clue—about stories of some other major countries that have been called on the carpet for spying, but we have discussed in the abstract general principles about both privacy and transparency.

Although I do think the NYT is unrelentingly harsh, it is a news organization with admirable journalistic standards and understandably won’t be quiet about certain issues that are of great concern to journalists. One of the issues in a news literacy class is “what makes a journalist?” and “what makes a good citizen journalist?” How much is the journalist a watch dog—for governments and other institutions? We use criteria that have been widely discussed among some of the world’s leading journalists.  I can’t always get the articles I want on this and other topics—this week my computer keeps shutting down; it is unbearably slow. But it is always slow, for layers and layers of reasons.

The issues here I believe are of paramount importance in any country, and I don’t know how successful I’ve been as a teacher. But my goal has not been to cover every possible story. My goal has simply been to ask questions.

It’s not fish, but fishing I’m after.