EVER since Russell of the Times forced a change in British government policy during the Crimean war through his vivid and shocking dispatches, the reporting of news has had the potential to shape and influence world events. Cable News Network has taken the process a step further, beaming momentous occasions live into newsrooms and centres of government around the world.
In the summer of 1989, CNN focused global attention on the drama taking place in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. It has profoundly affected the perception of China ever since. Who can ever forget its footage of the man with the small satchel who stood in front of a column of tanks' and motioned them to turn away? This symbol of individual resistance to the armed power of the state captured the imagination of viewers everywhere.
The Bureau Chief of CNN at the time was Mike Chinoy, and this book is a vivid and extraordinary account of a career centred on China which thrust him into prominence at this crucial time. It is essential reading for students of broadcasting, and of China.
I first encountered Mike Chinoy twenty five years ago in Belfast as a typical longhaired American freelance with a droopy moustache, who saw Northern Ireland as the nearest available revolution to report. He had done his homework and could quote Padraig Pearse, but he was better versed in the sayings of Chairman Mao Zedong. Belfast was only a stop on the way to a reporting career in the country which fascinated and intrigued him from the start.
He studied China at Yale University and saw Mao as the liberator of millions of peasants who had founded a genuine egalitarian society. He first went there in 1973 as a tourist of the revolution, a sympathetic journalist on a friendship tour. But he soon swapped his ideological baggage for hard nosed journalism.
For eight years he worked for NBC in Hong Kong, then switched to CNN, which sent him to Beijing to open a bureau in 1987. The potential of Ted Turner's network had become evident during the 1986 uprising in the Philippines when CNN, under Chinoy, was regularly hours ahead of the competition, but it was still known derisively by its US network rivals as "Chicken Noodle News".
All that changed in 1989 as CNN led the way in chronicling the daily drama being played out in Tiananmen Square where a popular upsurge against corruption and in favour of democracy was eventually crushed by the tanks of the People's Liberation Army.
It was a critical point in Chinese history. It was also a defining moment for the new media of the Information Age. For the first time television documented almost minute by minute a popular uprising against a communist power. By broadcasting live, it affected the dynamics and momentum of the events it was covering. At a critical moment CNN deprived the Chinese government of a crucial political commodity information.
Chinoy examines the consequences of the reporting of Tiananmen, and the mistakes in our inexact science, such as the lack of precision whereby the term "Tiananmen Square Massacre" slipped into western journalists' vocabulary - the violence raged in the nearby streets - allowing the authorities to attack media credibility and distract attention from the scale of the killing elsewhere.
Like his television reporting, Chinoy's account of those hectic days is professional, thoughtful, beautifully told and full of the drama and emotion of the time. "The rumours swept the square," he writes in the chapter on the crackdown, "like the violent windstorms that descend on Beijing every spring, alternately intensifying and abating, only to return with even greater force." As the army moved in he was roused from sleep. "Wake up," the young, redheaded Bulgarian exchange student shouted ... "I have message from Charlie. Shit is coming down." And then when it was all over, he writes, "I staggered back into the Sheraton Hotel. Lynne was there. I fell into her arms, weeping."
The American broadcaster holds himself and his colleagues partly responsible for a misunderstanding which is prevalent to this day of the nature of the dynamic changes taking place in China. The television images of Tiananmen perpetuated the notion of the People's Republic as a giant, monolithic, malevolent force. Taking a balanced view several years later was impossible for most people, he concludes.
The "self righteous and smug" Chinese leaders were easy to despise, he observes, and it took a conscious act of will on his own part to acknowledge the profound shift under way in China. In the early 1990s, he devoted much of his work to showing how reform was gradually transforming and generally improving and liberalising the lives of Chinese citizens.
CNN itself might take note. Its promotional advertisements on China coverage include flashbacks of the Tiananmen violence and are beamed around the world almost every day, even today.
"It was a sobering illustration of the power of television," concludes Chinoy, who is now CNN's Hong Kong bureau chief, "that none of the images in my current stories could compete with the drama of the man confronting the tank."