Caijing looks at GAPP, ignores elephants

CCTV - "No reason for a name change."
Responding to a suggestion circulating online that China Central Television change its name to "China National Television," CCTV said that there was no need to change a nearly fifty-year-old name that has been among the world's top 500 brands for two years running. It dismissed concerns that the English initialism would become confused with closed-circuit TV as China's cultural influence expands abroad. Oh, and it also pointed out, just for good measure, that CCTV "walks beside the people, coexists with the motherland, keeps pace with the world, and advances with the times," while steadfastly upholding a broadcast style of "ethnic character, national behavior, and worldwide influence." (The Beijing News, link - Chinese)

Caijing: Corruption in the state-owned media
Caijing magazine has published the English version of an opinion piece by Zhan Jiang: 'Corruption in Regional News Bureaus: An Analysis'. Excerpt:

Hence, we should reexamine our system under which state-run news media are now operated as for-profit businesses. As Dr. He Zengke, a political scholar, pointed out in his book, New Road of Anticorruption, “state-run institutions such as newspapers, publications and broadcasting stations have both governmental and commercial characteristics; this is the systematic root of many unhealthy tendencies in the field.”

There are several rather large elephants in the Chinese news room that are not mentioned in the piece. Ah well. (link).

China to Tom Friedman: The world ain't so flat
Jonathan Ansfield writing in Spot-On:

“The World is Flat” was scheduled to hit bookshelves in Chinese earlier this summer...

The publishing house had to push back their scheduled release date on short notice, [Hunan Science and Technology Press Editorial Director Lin] said, in order to make “additional revisions”...

...When pressed for details about what was wrong with the quality, he said portions was not "in accordance national conditions"... (link)

Anti-Japanese protest in Beijing
Jane Macartney yesterday reported:

But the demonstration outside the Japanese embassy this morning drew a crowd of scarcely more than a dozen protesters. They were vastly outnumbered by plainclothes police, uniformed police, police cars, vans and buses...

...The protest lasted all of 10 minutes. Perhaps 15 to err on the generous side. After a brief march by the tightly guarded embassy, the group were swiftly dispersed by plainclothes police... (link)

ESWN has translated a brief report from Hong Kong's Apple Daily (link. There did not seem to be any reports in the Mainland media about the process, although Xinhua released a condemnation of Koizumi's visit to the Yakasuni shrine (link).

China economic growth driven by profit as well as investment
Richard McGregor in the Financial Times:

China’s measures to cool the economy may not have a large and immediate impact because of the increasing role of profits in funding investment, the main driver of the country’s double-digit growth this year, according to the World Bank... (link)

HK politician calls for journalist's release
Michael Ng in Hong Kong's The Standard reports:

[Allen Lee Peng-fei] a Hong Kong delegate to the National People's Congress has appealed to the central government to give a lenient sentence to - or release - SAR-based journalist Ching Cheong, who was tried on espionage charges behind closed doors in Beijing Tuesday... (link)

Bravery and excellence in the state-owned media
Some journalists from various state-owned news organizations have been awarded the Chang Jiang Tao Fen Journalism Prize. This is what Xinhua had to say about their achievements:

This is the kind of people they are: Whenever there is news, they anxiously hurry to the scene, whether it's in a city or in the countryside, whether there are seas of fire or boundless expanses of water, difficulties and harships or matters of life and death, they will go no matter what. They use their pens, their cameras, their microphones, their pages and their programs, to record the steps of history, reflect the heartfelt wishes of the masses, to carry forward socialism, and to castigate evil phenomena. .. (link - Chinese)

As opposed to that Ching Cheong character, who is clearly a miscreant.