By Judi McLeod
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
What were you doing on the Friday before Christmas?
While most folk were getting ready for the Big Day, the Canadian Radio-Television & Telecommunications Communication (CRTC) was opening the door to full scale Chinese propaganda.
To the background strains of Silent Night and White Christmas, CRTC mandarins approved nine--count 'em--nine Chinese state-run television networks to broadcast their shows in Canada.
2007 was to be the year of welcome propaganda in Canada and most Canadians were to know nothing about it until it was a bureaucratic fait de accompli.
The networks called the "Great Wall Package" are wholly-owned by China Central Television, the main state-run television network in China. China Central Television is the CBC of the Peoples' Republic of China.
In a commercial world where it is increasingly impossible to avoid the 'Made in China' tag when shopping, Communist China has entered Canadian homes for television viewers surfing channels.
The International media watchdog Reporters Without Borders called the regime's news agency, Zinhua, "the world's biggest propaganda agency".
It's not as if CRTC was taken by surprise.
"Canadians Against Propaganda (CAP) was among more than 2,500 groups and individuals to submit letters to the CRTC against the Great Wall application when the CRTC made the unprecedented move earlier this year to reopen public comments for evidence of hate incitement. More than 2,000 others signed petition signatures against the application." (www.ahdu88.blogspot.com).
"CAP made clear in its submission the well-documented fact that state-run media in China, including television networks, have for decades been used by the Communist Party to incite hatred against persecuted groups. They are weapons of a repressive and deceitful regime."
Other submissions made clear that the Communist regime continues its persecutions of Tibetans, Falun Gong practitioners, Christian house churches, democracy advocates, Muslim Uighurs and others, and that CCTV is obligated to toe the Communist Party's line on these persecutions through its programming.
CRTC, our supposed guardian of the airwaves, has always had a hang up about keeping Canadian content sacrosanct against all costs.
Now CCTV, which will mix sports and entertainment programming along with propaganda, will be broadcasting in several Chinese dialects to capitalize on Canada's rapidly growing Chinese-speaking market.
With CCTV, Canadian television will never see exposes lamenting China's appalling record on human rights, programs that detail the harvesting of human organs for sale or get to watch Chinese citizens being led away in handcuffs for the crime of writing essays on the worldwide net.
The nine networks' journalists and producers are monitored in China by the China Radio Film and Television Group, which is self-touted as "an important mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee, an important cultural battlefield for the CCP and our country."
In other words, public television styled along the same lines Joseph Stalin would have engineered for his television watching masses.
Count on the nine Chinese channels giving voice to Beijing's defamation of the Dalai Lama, why China should rule democratic Taiwan, attack with impunity Falun Gong practitioners as members of an evil cult and promote the defiance of the Vatican in the middle kingdom.
"Remember how China suppressed the outbreak of SARS (Sever Acute Respiratory Syndrome) epidemic in the summer of 2003, which killed 800 people around the world, including 44 in Toronto?" (www.asianpost.com).
To illustrate how deftly Big Brother will control the networks, in June 2005, the Publicity Department of the Communist Party told China Central Television, which owns the nine stations given the green light by the CRTC, that national press must "communicate" with officials in the area being investigated and inform them of the content of the critical reporting before publishing the article or airing the program.
Chinese television news producers were also ordered to highlight the positive. Even in exposes on corruption, they must emphasize that the sleaze was an exception while the overwhelming majority of officials had high moral standards.
History will be rewritten and upcoming generations will be told a different story about the tragedy of Tiananmen Square.
Shumin Lu, the Chinese ambassador to Canada, puts it this way, the nine new channels will go a long way to "help diversify the cultural life of the Canadian people".
The core mandate of CRTC is to ensure that what is broadcast in Canada reflects Canadian identity, attitudes and opinions.
"Maybe the CRTC can tell us when the suppression and distortion of news became a Canadian value," concludes the Asian Pacific Post.
Meanwhile, Canadians Against Propaganda and its coalition of 29 organizations is appealing to have the CRTC's decision overturned.
For shame that the CRTC decision was made while the Stephen Harper Conservative Government rules Ottawa.