Word: channelized
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...more viewers. Three years ago, Beijing opened its heavily restricted TV market a crack and granted News Corp. permission to offer its new Chinese-language network, Starry Sky, over cable in the southern province of Guangdong. News Corp. reciprocated by agreeing to air CCTV International on its Fox cable channels in America and later on its newly acquired satellite network, DirecTV. (Beijing struck a similar deal with Time Warner, owner of TIME, which still carries CCTV International on its cable systems but has sold its controlling stake in a Chinese channel.) As part of News Corp.'s commitment...
...Terenzio's job is to make it even better. As a part-time adviser to CCTV International's 24-hour English-language news channel, the independent producer is the first foreigner charged with putting an internationally friendly face on the mainland's propaganda machine. As if that weren't odd enough, his salary is paid by News Corp.-the global media conglomerate whose U.S.-based news channel, Fox News, is widely perceived as unabashedly pro-American and whose chairman, Rupert Murdoch, once infuriated China's leaders by stating that satellite-TV systems posed a threat to "totalitarian regimes everywhere...
...Terenzio, who covered four wars for ABC News, thought offering in-depth coverage of the mainland in the U.S. had promise, given China's growing economic importance. "Cable operators should salivate to carry the only channel dedicated to China," he says. But the news program needed a major overhaul. Soon after he took the job, Terenzio installed a satellite dish atop his Los Angeles home and pointed it at the CCTV satellite so that he could assess the task at hand...
...rebar-stiff newsreaders intoning stilted copy supported by cheap graphics. The channel was "essentially a translation service for Chinese-language programs," Terenzio says. But CCTV International did have one small advantage: the English-language broadcaster is unintelligible to most Chinese, so its journalists enjoy slightly more reporting leeway. In one of his first moves, Terenzio called a meeting to stress that "reporters never say what they think, only what they know" and to urge that all government statements be attributed to their source, standard practice in the West. Within two weeks, "they were practically attributing the weather report," Terenzio says...
...Terenzio has since helped make the program slicker by advising the channels' bosses to create snappy sets, commission new theme music and hire foreign anchors. More important, his efforts to introduce more aggressive standards of journalism have resulted in sharper news coverage. Last month, Terenzio sat in the reporting team's cluttered office to review a series called China's Challenges, an unusually frank exploration of issues such as environmental damage and poor rural health care. One episode on China's growing number of heroin addicts included footage of a dazed druggie lying in a puddle of vomit. "That...