On The Media

Our introduction to Shanghai interviews came from a man you’ll never see because he insisted in speaking off the record. A programming vice president at the Shanghai Media Group, he’s responsible for programming at a sizable and influential (we’ve heard) television network. It’s a direct competitor to CCTV, the state-sanctioned and controlled television broadcaster.

We spoke to him in the building maintenance break room. We weren’t allowed upstairs, we were told, for terrorism reasons.

We’d been told that it’s a rather sensitive time for the media in China, with the recent protests convincing many executives that conducting interviews with the Western press isn’t worth the trouble. And so our interview began – Brooke asked general background questions about what was on the network. For example, name that show now playing on the TV in the break room?

Silence. You realize in moments like this that there are so many different kinds of silence. This was rich, pregnant, I think-we-both-know-what’s-going-on-here silence. And that was pretty much it. He gazed thoughtfully off into space, furrowed his brow, stroked his chin, shifted positions and in the end told us next to nothing. We’ll never know for sure if he was anxious, or diffident, or following orders but it was an interesting opportunity to wonder about all the various forces weighing in on our time together.

A night later our stellar Shanghainese translator/fixer Ed Sheng assembled a group of his friends and we talked for an hour and a half about their China – one we’ve heard a great deal about. Outspoken, wholly thoughtful and eloquent – they couldn’t have been a starker contrast to the fraught staring contest of the night before.