Without any more preambles, let me introduce you to the Oriental Morning Post, one of the two big morning papers in Shanghai. Here are some of their front pages this week:

Look at these front pages carefully, have you noticed there are adverts? Yes. I buy this paper every morning and I was very excited to see they have found an innovative way to face the crisis: just get rid of the news and replace them with ads. Gray Lady, Mr. Murdoch, are you paying attention? Herein lies perchance the salvation of the press.

Seriously. Let me tell you a funny story about the death of a newspaper.

Like New York, Shanghai has two main morning papers that are in fierce competition with each other, the Oriental Morning Post and the Shanghai Morning Post. The former is a young paper that belongs to the large media group Wenhui, owner of the English language Shanghai Daily. The latter is part of the Jiefang Group, a historic paper controlled by the Shanghai committee of the Communist Party

The struggle between these newspapers reflects a story that is happening all over China, where relatively independent [2] groups are competing with the party media, and editors on both sides are led to push the thin line of information control in order to attract more readers. The party media has the advantage of established old reader bases and closer political coverage, so it is the “independent” media that is usually more vulnerable to attacks.

In the last few years, just like in the West, the menace of the freebies both online and offline has been a nightmare for these companies. Only in Shanghai the Metro Express reportedly has more readers (~1 million) than the two Posts together, and the internet continues to attract users by the millions.

Some have argued that the key for the survival of the big papers is reference columnists and quality, independent reporting. In a country where being an opinion leader can lead you straight to prison, and most of the news are directly copy/pasted from the Xinhua press agency, it hardly make sense to pay for the morning paper. The Metro has the same news, and the only way to get commentary on any important matter is surfing the internet fast enough to get there before the censors.

Today I asked my Shanghainese friend Mary Fu why she thinks the Oriental is better than the Metro Express, and she answered, literally: “they are similar, but the Oriental has less adverts“.

The Great Leap Forward

But let’s get to the point now, namely: I have strong reasons to suspect that the Oriental is playing a “Great Leap Forward” on its advertisers. In other words, it is reporting completely unrealistic numbers of readers. I have various reasons to believe this, mainly:

• They have been reporting the same figures (400,000) at least since 2008, while the conditions have severely worsened since then.

• They are playing desperate tactics, like the above front pages. In fact, in their table of prices for advertisers the “whole front page ad” is not even an option.

• If I know the Shanghainese well, they are not the kind of people to get ripped off 1 RMB every morning for something they can get for free.

I know it is ugly to accuse without proof, but frankly: doesn’t it look like the guys are struggling to pay the bills, and they have managed to find two wealthy foreign companies confused enough to part with half a million RMB? And perhaps they even cooked it up with an advertisement agency who has some good guanxi [3] in the group?

Pure speculation. Forget it, don’t listen to me. I recommend everyone to continue buying the Oriental Piaget Post. And I wish all the luck in the World to those 300 employees who are seriously going to need it.

Leading the Way for the Demise of the Newspapers

And now, for the desperate media leaders who are willing to try the new Chinese model, here are some some illustrative examples of the zombie life led by the long deceased Chinese journalism. Most of my examples are taken from Danwei, the best newspapers watching site I know.

Exhibit 1: Classic example of an advert disguised as news in a front page in the Oriental Guardian of Nanjing. With a characteristic lack of ethical principles learned from the censoring authorities, a large part of Chinese mainland newspapers routinely sell news space to advertisers or post adverts without any indication of their real nature.

Exhibit 2: From our very own Shanghai Oriental last week. On that day “Mont Blanc” must have smelled a rat, and the Post had to actually do a front page. In a desperate move to attract some eyes they pasted an unrelated photo of the sexiest woman in China. No article to go with it.

Exhibit 3: This is the kind of clever detail that makes me go back to Danwei all the time. Chongqing journalists are smarter than Shanghainese ones, it seems. See how they use their prime minister Wen to sell reading glasses on the front page. Pure genius!

Exhibit 4: See this Oriental Post from a few weeks ago, where the front page reports on the market price of an alpaca. This is a lame attempt to get back young readers lost to the internet, using an aging meme that is quickly becoming unfunny. Another innovation by the Post editors.

I could go on for ages with examples, I didn’t even spend 10 minutes looking for these. But enough is enough. Now I want to take you back to the West and try to picture the future in your mind.

Do you imagine what will happen when the New York Times follows the downward road pioneered by the Shanghai press?

Tell me, does the future look so bad?

Welcome to the Future of the Paper Media.

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CLARIFICATION: There are still many proud Chinese journalists who do their job honestly and the best they can under very difficult conditions. It goes without saying that the criticism here does not apply to them.

1. Yes, intranet, from now on I refuse to refer to this joke as the internet until the retards controlling the GFW understand the meaning of World Wide Web
2. By independent I mean companies not nominally controlled by the party, although obviously they are not really independent from the government directives given to all the press
3. Guanxi means relations, often – but not necessarily –  implying a shady exchange of favours. If you are going to be reading about China you better learn this word now

Nobody really cares about the “demise of the media” in the country of People’s Daily, instead the media debate here is framed in terms of pro-China vs. anti-China. Obama’s visit is a great case for analysis, because this time the controversy is too obscure to excite the masses, and we can look at it without the polarizing effects of the West-nut and Fenqing friends.

In all the discussions about the bias of Western Media, I have always stood in an uncomfortable middle ground: I do not agree that there is a World conspiracy to damage China’s image, but I see there is some serious bias in many of the news items, and I try to understand the reasons for this. This is my attempt to offer an explanation: it has to do with the three main powers that, in different proportions, influence all mass media: The States, Business and the Readers.

• Media predominantly controlled by The State. This includes some of the main Western players like BBC or NPR, together with the bulk of the Chinese media. The key for them to work is the existence of credible mechanisms to ensure their independence from the governing party, which is impossible in countries where party and State are not distinct. In some cases, like the BBC, they can produce quality results, but the system is not scalable: if ALL media was controlled by States, credibility would be seriously compromised.

• Media predominantly controlled by Business, whether it is the media corporations themselves or their major advertisers. This can include papers like the WSJ and News Corp, and also many local newspapers whose readership is (was) secured for geographical reasons, and whose main challenge was not really to get more readers (the population in their territory was limited) but to obtain the best advertising deals with the local business establishment.

• Media predominantly controlled by Readers is the one that strives to please as many readers as possible to increase its circulation. Examples include the British tabloids and a large part of the Internet Media. The fight to obtain more Readers has always been important from the times of Pulitzer, but with the  new technologies and the crisis of the newspapers, it has become vital. On the internet, nobody cares for Corporate opinions, or even for the laws of a State. The only valid parameter is clicks-per-month, and as long as you deliver, advertisers don’t ask questions.

All these three powers affect all media in different degrees, and none of them is conductive to unbiased reporting. But little is written about this, because most of us have come to terms with the harsh reality: whether good or bad, these influences are inevitable. Therefore, the debate is not about how to obtain a completely impartial newspaper, but rather how to preserve the many imperfect ones that already exist, whose bias go in different directions and impose “checks and balances” on each other, allowing the critical reader to draw some conclusions.

This diversity is essential, and what we are seeing nowadays in the West is a growing uniformity that comes from the eagerness to please readers. Ironically, by freeing itself from the first two powers, the media is falling prisoner of the third one. The internet has turned information into a perfect competition market where the consumer is king, but as we saw here, the invisible hand is not all that good at objective reporting.

When readers demand independence of the press, they rarely mean independence from themselves. But in fact they can be the most damaging influence: not only they are apt to delude themselves in droves, but also they lack a counterbalancing view to put the information in perspective. When the Media tells the readers what they want to hear, it closes a feedback loop of partisanship and preconceived ideas that it is difficult to escape, and the investigation of an outside truth becomes secondary. This is one of the main dangers of the media today, old and new alike.

Conclusion Seen from China

I don’t know to what extent this Reader factor is responsible for the bad quality of the Media, but I am convinced it plays a main role in the perceived anti-China bias. As we saw in Xinjiang, many Western journalists were there to witness The Cruelties of the Chinese system, just like Washington journalists followed Obama to witness The Censorship and Emerging Power of China. In both cases the stories were pre-written by the expectations of Western readers, and most media Old and New followed the script obediently.

I am convinced Reader bias is at the root of the problem because I simply can’t find any other explanation. It cannot be the interests of Big Business, when most corporations have big stakes in China, and a rise of nationalism or trade wars can only bring them losses. It cannot be the interests of governments like the US, which would have nothing to gain from a rise in Chinese nationalism and militarization. It has to be that Media bias is just a reflection of the image of China in Western societies, and that both Image and Reflection are constantly feeding each other.

The World needs well grounded, reasoned critiques of the CPP policies, and particularly of its disastrous records in Human Rights. But sadly, by focusing on wrong targets and wrong timing (for example, when hundreds of Chinese were being murdered in Urumqi) the Western media only manages to alienate itself from its Chinese followers, and create even more misunderstandings between China and the West. By doing this, they are are unwittingly providing the nationalist fuel that the CPP needs to survive, and further delaying the freedom that most of us honestly wish for the Chinese.

Supposing the Media really cared about fair reporting, they could try to get more PRC journalists and readers, and listen to their opinions to introduce a counterbalance in their closed loop with Western Readers.  Supposing the CCP really cared about the image of China, they could go a long way to improve it without necessarily giving up their authoritarian power.

But let’s not dream too much, neither the CCP’s nor the mainstream media have such priorities. They are old structures coming from a different World, and they share a single common objective: to survive in times of fast change.