Is always quite the experience turning up at the Camden studios of China Central Television (CCTV) and contributing to a segment for their flagship current affairs programme World Insight.
On 16 June, 2013 I participated in a panel discussion with Allen Friedman (Washington), from the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution, and Teng Jianqun (Beijing), Director of the Department for American Studies and a senior research fellow at China Institute of International Studies. We discussed the security, espionage, and privacy issues of the leaked documents on the presence of PRISM, a system from the National Security Agency (NSA) in the US for scraping data from the servers of nine of the biggest digital telecommunications companies. Needless to say this was a significantly more serious discussion than my more irreverent look at PRISM and Douglas Adams for the Huffington Post. Unfortunately they referred to me as Dr Chris Brauer from the Institute of Management Studies at the University of Hong Kong (??). In the IMS we do have global ambitions but haven’t made it that far yet!
The host of World Insight, Tian Wei, is a formidable journalist and admirably tackles controversial or topical issues while paying homage to the requirements of representing a viewpoint from China.
Even the preparation for these segments is much more formalised than doing TV spots for SKY, CNN, or the BBC, as the guest receives the questions in advance and is asked to do preparation to address them in detail. This might seem an unusual approach to western viewers accustomed to hosts hijacking interviews with unpredictable topics but actually it works really well in creating a stimulating discussion. It’s not that this would be suitable for every interview format but in the panel structure of World Insight it functions very effectively. It is also nice that such a decent amount of time, typically 15-20 minutes, is designated to the panel discussion instead of just glossing over the details of complex issues.
The post Dr Chris Brauer discusses PRISM on China Central Television appeared first on IMS Hub.
