Investigative Journalism in China: Eight Cases in Chinese Watchdog Journalism
This volume offers a comprehensive, first-hand look at investigative journalism in China, including insider accounts from reporters behind some of China's top stories in recent years.
Selling Blood Spreads HIV
In the central farmland of the early 1990s, China saw the average farmer working long hours, rising before dawn and often not returning home until after sunset. Fields were ploughed, planted and irrigated by hand. Compensation for these long days of labour was minimal: the average rural farming household earned between US&8 and US&12 a month, a meagre living eked out from an average of 0.05 ha of land per person, about the size of two tennis courts. Faced with pressures to feed and educate one’s family and to ensure the successful marriage of one’s children (often an expensive proposition), the farm labourer was in a position of particular financial vulnerability. It was through this fragile population that the commercial plasma donation industry ploughed a disease-ridden trench leading to the infection of thousands with HIV.
From the Inside Out
This article addresses how to create democratic news media that foster participatory citizenship and government accountability. Using the case of Mexico, where journalism underwent a deep transformation in the 1980s and 1990s, the research finds that societal-level changes such as democratization and economic liberalization are only part of the explanation. What went on inside news organizations determined whether media took on a civic orientation enabling the creation of a public sphere, resisted societal-level change altogether, or reacted to only market-based cues. The result of these disparate transformations was the dissolution of an authoritarian institution into three competing models of news production with profoundly different sociopolitical implications. The study also discusses the application of sociological theory on organizations and institutions to the question of journalistic change in some depth.