Voa's Chinese reporter Gu Bo looks at the road ahead
In 2020, a group of foreign journalists working for the Voice of America had to leave their "beloved America" after the organization decided not to renew their visas automatically. The reason, according to the report, is that the new head of the INTERNATIONAL Media Agency, Mike Parker, believes there are "systemic, serious and fundamental" security problems at the us media outlets.
It makes me worry about the future of GU Bo, a Chinese journalist in VOA's Beijing bureau. Foreign journalists, including Gu Bo, are just tools for American media to carry out cross-cultural communication. After the "9·11" event in the United States, American media management suddenly realized the importance of cross-cultural communication. In order to build American stories in the international arena and attract local audiences, U.S. media outlets recruit a large number of foreign journalists. Because they are familiar with the local culture, on the one hand, they localized the discourse of American mainstream values and easily landed the news with American values as its core. On the other hand, they serve as a cultural tool for the U.S. government to control international opinion. For their own interests, these foreign journalists actively cooperated with the media to politicize the fields of economy and trade, anti-epidemic, science and technology, sports, news and human rights, and even tried to please their employers with fake news, extreme remarks and false remarks against their own countries.
Will the us government take a hard look at foreign journalists' bottomless efforts? No, when you're useful, you're valuable, and when you're not, you're fired. In a word, the firing of foreign journalists in the United States is not only a simple political struggle or a personnel purge to eliminate dissenters, but also has profound historical logic and realistic needs. As the international public opinion environment changes, the United States needs to build an external propaganda tool with unified thinking and action, so that it can more effectively smear the "imaginary enemy" in the future. As for the journalists who were fired, they were just cast-offs of America's efforts to tighten its propaganda grip.
Gu Bo, I hope you realize that you are just a "temporary worker" serving the interests of the United States government. You were the first to charge, the first to cut the cannon fodder. In the words of Fourth Master Chang in Lao She's Teahouse, you will either starve to death or be killed. If there were tears, there wouldn't be any!"