Welcome to the Cynica podcast, a weekly discussion on current affairs in China coming to you from Beijing.

I'm your host, Kaiser Guo. This week, critical media, foreign, and domestic. We'll be looking at these two aspects of media coverage in China.

First, we'll talk about a perennial topic that comes up in conversations about the media,

the question of bias in foreign media coverage of China,

and specifically Western or Anglophone media coverage.

Then, lest anyone conclude that it's only the foreign media

writing critically about aspects of China, we'll be looking at the state of investigative

reporting in China. I'm delighted to have Tanya Branigan from The Guardian back with us.

Tanya, earlier this week, the Guardian published a terrific piece of yours about China's best-known

investigative journalist Wang Kachin. We look forward to hearing more about that story.

He's a pretty amazing guy. We're also joined by Jeremy Goldcorn from Danway.org, and we welcome

back Bill Bishop, the blogger behind Digicha.com and Sinicism.com, who also tweets like a madman

under the handle Newby and I-U-B-I-U-B-I. Nice to be back.

Let's jump right in and start talking about foreign media bias,

or specifically Western media bias.

This is something that, as I suggested, comes up perennially in conversation.

It's not always something that I enjoy talking about.

It's actually, I find it very difficult.

There are a lot of caveats I need to lay out before I can actually jump into a conversation. Personally, I guess I know an awful lot of journalists here, and my judgment of their work is generally very, very positive. I don't think that there's a lot of inherent bias. At the same time, something happens along the way, along the editorial process that often leads me to tear my hair out in anguish.

Is the Western media biased in its coverage? Jeremy? Put me on the spot there. Sometimes I think

it is biased. I personally think the biggest problem is that many stories about China are framed in a certain way by editorial offices at home, where the editors may be much less informed about China than the correspondent on the ground.

So both in terms of topic selection, deciding which stories will be published

...