— ‘Speak their point of view’ —
“When you go to rural Kenya now, you see that everyone can watch TV, listen to radio, people are more educated and we want to talk about that,” she told AFP.
On the delicate issue of whether Beijing censors content, Douglas Okwatch, editor on the Saturday “Talk Africa” programme presented by Marshall, said staff have a free hand on their stories “as long as they are objective, balanced and not dragging in unnecessary controversies.”
“One thing they (CCTV) are doing right,” analyst Wu told AFP, “is to provide a platform for Africans to speak their point of view.
“On other channels, I don’t find such platforms to speak on Africa by Africans,” she said, but questioned how CCTV Africa will fare if it emphasises only the upside of Sino-African relations.
“Credibility is not covering only the positive stories,” said Wu.
Hong Kong University’s Bandurski, meanwhile, said CCTV news products “must be subjected to political controls, even if these controls are not necessarily as rigid as those imposed on domestic Chinese media.”
But he agreed it will be “very difficult to build a credible international media when you do not have sufficient leeway to produce truly professional coverage.”
CCTV Africa chief Song, whom the staff all call “Madame Song”, insists that Beijing has not rejected any content so far, and hopes soon to add a second hour of programming out of Nairobi.
And at a time when many Western media houses are struggling to survive, the Chinese TV giant has the means to finance its expansion projects.
CCTV aims to rank among “the biggest media groups in the world”, said Song.
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