4 ms·

This isn't "the west" cowing down before China, but a private, profit-seeking news organization deciding on a more pragmatic (albeit cowardly) option after what

by r0h1n 13y ago

This isn't "the west" cowing down before China, but a private, profit-seeking news organization deciding on a more pragmatic (albeit cowardly) option after what must have been a big cost-benefit analysis. Sadly, this is the future of news. No news organization can today afford to antagonize one of its largest (potential) markets simply to strive for some higher journalistic zeal. Take Google for instance. Does anyone today care that Google stood its ground against the Chinese government and squandered the entire country away to competitors? Whatever halo they earned when they made that decision has long vanished. Edit: Morals and halos don't pay journalist salaries.

davidjgraph 13y ago
"Does anyone today care that Google stood its ground against the Chinese government and squandered the entire country away to competitors?" Yes, me. It's the single factual act of Google's history that sticks in my mind. It says to me someone near the top will lose revenue to make an ethical stand. I can't remember too many other concrete examples of this in large companies.
- jonmrodriguez 13y ago
  Didn't Facebook do the same?
  - andreyf 13y ago
    No.
  - mtgx 13y ago
    Facebook strikes you as the company that would have principles and morals? The reason they are not in China is because the government wouldn't let them, with or without censorship. They are too much of a "threat to the unity of the society" - you know, the typical authoritarian excuse.
  - selmnoo 13y ago
    Oh, you have no idea how badly Zuckerburg wants to be successful in China. Zuck has been learning Mandarin for a long time, I really think a primary motivation for that has to do with plans of really getting going in China. When he visited China in 2010, the first two places he went to were Baidu's and Alibaba's offices. There was supposedly a partnership in the works but much to Zuck's chagrin it ended up never materializing. The company has been trying on and on again to get into China somehow, Sandberg has been on the record saying "China's the big one" (she talked a lot about it in the Charlie Rose interview from some time back), Zuck himself I think was scheduled to give China another visit but those plans were presumably scrapped in the post-NSA-leaks environment. Now more than ever, it is clear that no American social networking media company will ever have substantial market share in China. The Chinese government will never let it fly, it's as simple as that.
    - tokenadult 13y ago
      Now more than ever, it is clear that no American social networking media company will ever have substantial market share in China. The Chinese government will never let it fly, it's as simple as that. A free market in Internet companies in China is not possible until regime change in China. I think a change in government in China to a post-communist system is moderately possible, although various geopolitical trade-offs have caused this to take longer in China than it did in most parts of eastern Europe. The bubble economy in China makes it likely that there will be internal pressure there for regime change when the bubble pops.
      - w1ntermute 13y ago
        > I think a change in government in China to a post-communist system is moderately possible Transitions in other Asian countries from authoritarian (which is what China is right now) to democratic governments typically coincided with the populace reaching a certain level of wealth and education. I don't see that level being reached in China any time soon because the sort of accelerated export-oriented growth that worked in other Asian countries won't work when you have more than a billion people. China is still very far from the levels of wealth and prosperity in Korea or Taiwan when they transitioned to democracy.
- chrischen 13y ago
  Google didn't stand its ground. Google also did a cost-benefit analysis and realized that China wasn't going to let a foreign company control its internet and monitor its data, which in turn was monitored by the US government. Further cost-benefit analysis by Google determined that it was more beneficial to tell everyone it was for principles.
  - r0h1n 13y ago
    Yes, quite possibly the truth. I'd have said so myself, except I've been moderating my Google conspiracy theories to some extent in HN comments.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - turing 13y ago
    That may very well be true, but stating it as fact just decreases your credibility.
    - gibwell 13y ago
      No more than those who starte as fact that Google acted out of higher morality.
    - chrischen 13y ago
      This is what Google employees from China have told me. I'm stating it as fact because from my perspective, with the information I have, it has appeared as almost fact to me.
- r0h1n 13y ago
  FWIW, so did I in 2010. But what benefit - strategic or tactical - does that hold for Google today? Ask most people today if Google "does no evil", and you'll get a sense of what happened to that moral halo. In the same vein, can the moral gains for Bloomberg from running these two stories outweigh the monetary/reporting freedom losses that will come too?
  - jnbiche 13y ago
    Well, just like in the case of human beings, companies have to continue to not screw people over to be viewed of as moral and/or ethical. Just like we have to not steal, harm, enslave, etc. each single day to be considered ethical people. Maybe someone can get away with not doing the right thing once or twice and still be viewed as an overall ethical person, but just because they do the right thing once or twice does not earn them that honor.
- jonnathanson 13y ago
  That's the cover story, yes. The whole truth is a little more nuanced. Google abandoned China because the Chinese government was hacking and stealing its technology, rerouting its traffic to homegrown and government-subsidized competitors like Baidu, and generally making the value of the market not worth the hassle. Google wanted to do business in China, but basically it couldn't. The government's demands to censor and monitor search results were just icing on a tall, thick cake. To whatever extent Google based its decision to cede the Chinese market on ethical principles, that's wonderful and to be commended. But ethics probably had 10% to do with it. Principal always drives principle.
anigbrowl 13y ago
Sadly, this is the future of news. Not to mention the past and present of news, in most cases. One reason I enjoy reading the Economist is that they seem to take a peculiar glee in describing the scissoring-out of their articles by the authorities in various places, from China to a US prison.
kumarm 13y ago
Not true. That (At least to me) proved that Google stands for ethics for ever. I am not simply saying this as an observer. I am saying this as someone who is impacted by the choice google made. We are an Android shop based in US with 20% of revenue coming in from India. I am sure if Google didn't make that choice, 30% of our revenue today would have been from China (which today is less than 1%). We are happy we lost that 30% revenue for better human rights.
- gibwell 13y ago
  'Google stands for ethics forever' You're putting blind faith in the behavior of a corporation. That sounds a lot like you've joined a religion.
fauigerzigerk 13y ago
The west should make it absolutely clear that it considers these politically motivated actions illegal trade barriers and that it will retaliate. While some companies - most notably Google - do the right thing against their own interests, you are right that this isn't something that can be expected of profit driven corporations in general. That's exactly why governments should act. But we can all do somthing to make it clear this is unacceptable: User-agent: Baiduspider Disallow: / [Edit] And don't forget: User-agent: QihooBot Disallow: /
- grey-area 13y ago
  If you think this is unacceptable, consider that the nytimes, where this story was published, has also held back or failed to publish articles critical of the US on multiple occasions in the recent past - wiretapping under bush, Iraq war, torture, wikileaks. That's not to say they are a propaganda organ or always toe the line, but they have killed a significant story just like this (phone tapping) because of US pressure, and they are one of the more critical US news outlets. I don't think we should make this into a battle between East and West, as the nytimes has framed it here, it is a battle between corporate and state interests and those they govern, over who owns the news, which to a large extent defines the limits of our thought. That happens in every country, and with every sufficiently influential news org.
  - fauigerzigerk 13y ago
    These things are always a matter of degree and subjective judgement. I have made up my mind. Systematically preventing criticism of a ruling elite that has no democratic legitimacy whatsoever is on a different scale than what happens in the US or Europe (which is bad enough). I'm not in favor of a large scale trade war or boycott. But in this very specific instance, where one company - Google - has been thrown out of China for taking a stand, and another company with global ambitions benefits from it, I think blocking the latter is not disproportionate. (I'm not in any way affiliated with Google. In fact, Google is one of my main competitors)
schuke 13y ago
True, but if many companies do this on a wide range of sectors then wouldn't it be hard, if not impossible, to distinguish "the West cowing down" and "private orgnisations being more pragmatic"? I'd say it's a dangrous move, whose consequences must be vigilently watched. The difference between this and Google is that whether or not Google operates in China, the world outside of China is not affected. People everywhere else still get the same search results. But if Bloomberg decides that it's better to report less negatively in English to its audiences in the whole world in order to make a profit from the Chinese market, it's not the Chinese audience, but the outside world that's gonna be hurt.
mtgx 13y ago
This is why I've always believed Wikileaks and whistleblowing/leaking are together the "future of news" (at least real news, that uncover truths). Wikileaks isn't motivated by making a "profit", other than its immediate needs for survival. As for "leaking", it's already been one of the main sources for "investigative journalism", it's just that in the past it was more of a "push" thing from journalists, to try and get the classified documents, and in the future it will be more of a "pull" thing, where the leaks will come to them, and they just need to figure out what's the story from them. This is especially important when media entities can't have "boots on the ground" anymore, and they need to be a lot leaner - blog-level leaner. And it's all good as long as they keep their integrity, which ultimately is what really matters about a news agency, no matter how small or big, and we can already see most, if not all, of the media entities have become corrupt already, so it's not like we should put our trust in the big news agencies only anymore. I expect Greenwald's news agency to be very successful if they have a document leak platform on the site, and promote it very well, and put it front and center on the site, because now everyone knows Greenwald has integrity, so a lot of future whistleblowers will coming to him, because they trust him, just like Snowden did. The real, government-breaking stories of the future, will be coming from small/lean news agencies that have a very high-level of integrity. However, we, the people, also need to push for much bigger whistleblowing protections, unless we expect every whistleblower from now on to literally throw away their lives for us, which is really quite an unreasonable expectation, even from most potential whistleblowers.
nailer 13y ago
> Edit: Morals and halos don't pay journalist salaries 'I needed money' is a poor excuse for unethical behavior.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
Future? This is the way it has always been, and we have just been fools to believe otherwise. It was only after Saddam Hussein had fallen that we learned that for years CNN had moderated it's news about his regime in order to maintain a presence in the country. Today "access" is still such a big deal in network news, it's extremely likely that many more similar stories of news organizations keeping themselves in check in order to maintain that access could be told today. About regimes, about our own government, about corporations, about powerful individuals. It's ironic that the news media has advanced so far in attempting to mold themselves as some sort of aloof and apart institution, some form of abstract art with no holds to the mundane world of everyday lives and things. And yet at the same time they have become such big business that they are plugged into, and often complicit with, so many of the power structures of the world.
jasonwocky 13y ago
> Edit: Morals and halos don't pay journalist salaries. Yeah, but at some point in their behavior, you kinda have to stop calling them "journalist" salaries.
_pmf_ 13y ago
> Sadly, this is the future of news. The future?
LekkoscPiwa 13y ago
>This isn't "the west" cowing down before China, but a private, profit-seeking news organization deciding on a more pragmatic (albeit cowardly) option after what must have been a big cost-benefit analysis. Well, it is. Because if the US Government would have had a firm stance on protecting Freedom of Speech then the cost-analysis for Bloomberg would be - it is not worth pissing off the US Government.
foobarqux 13y ago
>Sadly, this is the future of news. This is the past of news too.
gggmaster 13y ago
against? joke! https://ditu.google.cn/ https://ditu.google.cn/

by r0h1n 13y ago

davidjgraph 13y ago

"Does anyone today care that Google stood its ground against the Chinese government and squandered the entire country away to competitors?" Yes, me. It's the single factual act of Google's history that sticks in my mind. It says to me someone near the top will lose revenue to make an ethical stand. I can't remember too many other concrete examples of this in large companies.

jonmrodriguez 13y ago
Didn't Facebook do the same?
- andreyf 13y ago
  No.
- mtgx 13y ago
  Facebook strikes you as the company that would have principles and morals? The reason they are not in China is because the government wouldn't let them, with or without censorship. They are too much of a "threat to the unity of the society" - you know, the typical authoritarian excuse.
- selmnoo 13y ago
  Oh, you have no idea how badly Zuckerburg wants to be successful in China. Zuck has been learning Mandarin for a long time, I really think a primary motivation for that has to do with plans of really getting going in China. When he visited China in 2010, the first two places he went to were Baidu's and Alibaba's offices. There was supposedly a partnership in the works but much to Zuck's chagrin it ended up never materializing. The company has been trying on and on again to get into China somehow, Sandberg has been on the record saying "China's the big one" (she talked a lot about it in the Charlie Rose interview from some time back), Zuck himself I think was scheduled to give China another visit but those plans were presumably scrapped in the post-NSA-leaks environment. Now more than ever, it is clear that no American social networking media company will ever have substantial market share in China. The Chinese government will never let it fly, it's as simple as that.
  - tokenadult 13y ago
    Now more than ever, it is clear that no American social networking media company will ever have substantial market share in China. The Chinese government will never let it fly, it's as simple as that. A free market in Internet companies in China is not possible until regime change in China. I think a change in government in China to a post-communist system is moderately possible, although various geopolitical trade-offs have caused this to take longer in China than it did in most parts of eastern Europe. The bubble economy in China makes it likely that there will be internal pressure there for regime change when the bubble pops.
    - w1ntermute 13y ago
      > I think a change in government in China to a post-communist system is moderately possible Transitions in other Asian countries from authoritarian (which is what China is right now) to democratic governments typically coincided with the populace reaching a certain level of wealth and education. I don't see that level being reached in China any time soon because the sort of accelerated export-oriented growth that worked in other Asian countries won't work when you have more than a billion people. China is still very far from the levels of wealth and prosperity in Korea or Taiwan when they transitioned to democracy.
chrischen 13y ago
Google didn't stand its ground. Google also did a cost-benefit analysis and realized that China wasn't going to let a foreign company control its internet and monitor its data, which in turn was monitored by the US government. Further cost-benefit analysis by Google determined that it was more beneficial to tell everyone it was for principles.
- r0h1n 13y ago
  Yes, quite possibly the truth. I'd have said so myself, except I've been moderating my Google conspiracy theories to some extent in HN comments.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- turing 13y ago
  That may very well be true, but stating it as fact just decreases your credibility.
  - gibwell 13y ago
    No more than those who starte as fact that Google acted out of higher morality.
  - chrischen 13y ago
    This is what Google employees from China have told me. I'm stating it as fact because from my perspective, with the information I have, it has appeared as almost fact to me.
r0h1n 13y ago
FWIW, so did I in 2010. But what benefit - strategic or tactical - does that hold for Google today? Ask most people today if Google "does no evil", and you'll get a sense of what happened to that moral halo. In the same vein, can the moral gains for Bloomberg from running these two stories outweigh the monetary/reporting freedom losses that will come too?
- jnbiche 13y ago
  Well, just like in the case of human beings, companies have to continue to not screw people over to be viewed of as moral and/or ethical. Just like we have to not steal, harm, enslave, etc. each single day to be considered ethical people. Maybe someone can get away with not doing the right thing once or twice and still be viewed as an overall ethical person, but just because they do the right thing once or twice does not earn them that honor.
jonnathanson 13y ago
That's the cover story, yes. The whole truth is a little more nuanced. Google abandoned China because the Chinese government was hacking and stealing its technology, rerouting its traffic to homegrown and government-subsidized competitors like Baidu, and generally making the value of the market not worth the hassle. Google wanted to do business in China, but basically it couldn't. The government's demands to censor and monitor search results were just icing on a tall, thick cake. To whatever extent Google based its decision to cede the Chinese market on ethical principles, that's wonderful and to be commended. But ethics probably had 10% to do with it. Principal always drives principle.

anigbrowl 13y ago

Sadly, this is the future of news. Not to mention the past and present of news, in most cases. One reason I enjoy reading the Economist is that they seem to take a peculiar glee in describing the scissoring-out of their articles by the authorities in various places, from China to a US prison.

kumarm 13y ago

Not true. That (At least to me) proved that Google stands for ethics for ever. I am not simply saying this as an observer. I am saying this as someone who is impacted by the choice google made. We are an Android shop based in US with 20% of revenue coming in from India. I am sure if Google didn't make that choice, 30% of our revenue today would have been from China (which today is less than 1%). We are happy we lost that 30% revenue for better human rights.

gibwell 13y ago
'Google stands for ethics forever' You're putting blind faith in the behavior of a corporation. That sounds a lot like you've joined a religion.

fauigerzigerk 13y ago

The west should make it absolutely clear that it considers these politically motivated actions illegal trade barriers and that it will retaliate. While some companies - most notably Google - do the right thing against their own interests, you are right that this isn't something that can be expected of profit driven corporations in general. That's exactly why governments should act. But we can all do somthing to make it clear this is unacceptable: User-agent: Baiduspider Disallow: / [Edit] And don't forget: User-agent: QihooBot Disallow: /

grey-area 13y ago
If you think this is unacceptable, consider that the nytimes, where this story was published, has also held back or failed to publish articles critical of the US on multiple occasions in the recent past - wiretapping under bush, Iraq war, torture, wikileaks. That's not to say they are a propaganda organ or always toe the line, but they have killed a significant story just like this (phone tapping) because of US pressure, and they are one of the more critical US news outlets. I don't think we should make this into a battle between East and West, as the nytimes has framed it here, it is a battle between corporate and state interests and those they govern, over who owns the news, which to a large extent defines the limits of our thought. That happens in every country, and with every sufficiently influential news org.
- fauigerzigerk 13y ago
  These things are always a matter of degree and subjective judgement. I have made up my mind. Systematically preventing criticism of a ruling elite that has no democratic legitimacy whatsoever is on a different scale than what happens in the US or Europe (which is bad enough). I'm not in favor of a large scale trade war or boycott. But in this very specific instance, where one company - Google - has been thrown out of China for taking a stand, and another company with global ambitions benefits from it, I think blocking the latter is not disproportionate. (I'm not in any way affiliated with Google. In fact, Google is one of my main competitors)

schuke 13y ago

True, but if many companies do this on a wide range of sectors then wouldn't it be hard, if not impossible, to distinguish "the West cowing down" and "private orgnisations being more pragmatic"? I'd say it's a dangrous move, whose consequences must be vigilently watched. The difference between this and Google is that whether or not Google operates in China, the world outside of China is not affected. People everywhere else still get the same search results. But if Bloomberg decides that it's better to report less negatively in English to its audiences in the whole world in order to make a profit from the Chinese market, it's not the Chinese audience, but the outside world that's gonna be hurt.

mtgx 13y ago

This is why I've always believed Wikileaks and whistleblowing/leaking are together the "future of news" (at least real news, that uncover truths). Wikileaks isn't motivated by making a "profit", other than its immediate needs for survival. As for "leaking", it's already been one of the main sources for "investigative journalism", it's just that in the past it was more of a "push" thing from journalists, to try and get the classified documents, and in the future it will be more of a "pull" thing, where the leaks will come to them, and they just need to figure out what's the story from them. This is especially important when media entities can't have "boots on the ground" anymore, and they need to be a lot leaner - blog-level leaner. And it's all good as long as they keep their integrity, which ultimately is what really matters about a news agency, no matter how small or big, and we can already see most, if not all, of the media entities have become corrupt already, so it's not like we should put our trust in the big news agencies only anymore. I expect Greenwald's news agency to be very successful if they have a document leak platform on the site, and promote it very well, and put it front and center on the site, because now everyone knows Greenwald has integrity, so a lot of future whistleblowers will coming to him, because they trust him, just like Snowden did. The real, government-breaking stories of the future, will be coming from small/lean news agencies that have a very high-level of integrity. However, we, the people, also need to push for much bigger whistleblowing protections, unless we expect every whistleblower from now on to literally throw away their lives for us, which is really quite an unreasonable expectation, even from most potential whistleblowers.

nailer 13y ago

> Edit: Morals and halos don't pay journalist salaries 'I needed money' is a poor excuse for unethical behavior.

InclinedPlane 13y ago

Future? This is the way it has always been, and we have just been fools to believe otherwise. It was only after Saddam Hussein had fallen that we learned that for years CNN had moderated it's news about his regime in order to maintain a presence in the country. Today "access" is still such a big deal in network news, it's extremely likely that many more similar stories of news organizations keeping themselves in check in order to maintain that access could be told today. About regimes, about our own government, about corporations, about powerful individuals. It's ironic that the news media has advanced so far in attempting to mold themselves as some sort of aloof and apart institution, some form of abstract art with no holds to the mundane world of everyday lives and things. And yet at the same time they have become such big business that they are plugged into, and often complicit with, so many of the power structures of the world.

jasonwocky 13y ago

> Edit: Morals and halos don't pay journalist salaries. Yeah, but at some point in their behavior, you kinda have to stop calling them "journalist" salaries.

_pmf_ 13y ago

> Sadly, this is the future of news. The future?

LekkoscPiwa 13y ago

>This isn't "the west" cowing down before China, but a private, profit-seeking news organization deciding on a more pragmatic (albeit cowardly) option after what must have been a big cost-benefit analysis. Well, it is. Because if the US Government would have had a firm stance on protecting Freedom of Speech then the cost-analysis for Bloomberg would be - it is not worth pissing off the US Government.

foobarqux 13y ago

>Sadly, this is the future of news. This is the past of news too.

gggmaster 13y ago

against? joke! https://ditu.google.cn/ https://ditu.google.cn/