Breaking new ground

Edwin Maher was having a “Broadcast News'' moment beneath the white-hot studio lights — feeling a flicker of self-doubt, an attack of the sweats waiting to happen.

The veteran Australian TV reporter and weatherman was starting a job abroad as a prime-time news anchor. But decades of on-camera presence couldn't prepare him for this gig, mouthing the party line for a state-run TV network with armed soldiers posted at the entrance gates.

He was reading the news in Communist China. “I stared into the lens and mentioned the Communist Party, and almost lost it,'' he recalled. “It was a routine story about some move the regime was making. But I remember thinking to myself: ‘I can't believe I'm doing this.'''

Maher is the first non-Chinese news anchor for the state television's English-language station, CCTV International.
He was hired in 2003 as the station introduced a Western face to shake off its image as a government mouthpiece. Maher anchors the news up to four times a day for millions of viewers worldwide, including the United States.

Critics say Maher isn't a reporter at all but a shameless government yes-man who gives all Western journalists a bad name. Maher answers bluntly: He says he simply doesn't care.

He came to China on a whim after his wife died from a brain tumour in 2001. Since then he has become a minor celebrity in the country who has also written for the government-run China Daily on his fumbling efforts to learn the language and culture. The illustrated columns have recently been turned into a book.

But his fame lies in his CCTV broadcasts. With a solemn face and precise delivery, the greying Maher (who will say he is only in his fifties) reports the Chinese version of events on everything from relations with the US and Taiwan to the nation's annual crop yields.

Linguistic idol

Maher is among the three dozen foreigners at CCTV-9, performing roles such as editing and checking grammar. But he is by far the most visible. Fans use his broadcast as an English tutorial. Many monitor what kind of ties he wears, even the pen he uses.

His broadcasts signal the emergence of a global media that is blurring the lines between politics, language and nationality. In diversifying its news reports, CCTV officials say they hope their foreign reporters will help lend a more credible Chinese perspective on world affairs.

Media experts call the move a public relations ploy.
“It sounds like an effort to lend Western-style credibility to their news operations in a superficial way,'' said Neil Henry, a professor from the University of California, Berkeley School of Journalism.

“But a propagandist is a propagandist, no matter what one's race or country of origin.''

But Maher is unapologetic. He calls his CCTV-anchor job the biggest break of a career that has spanned decades in Australia and his native New Zealand.

“I don't feel that any of us are employed to be stooges,'' he said of fellow foreigners at the station. “But there are limits.''
Maher said he writes his own lead-ins to stories and is consulted on such issues as tone and length. But censors have the last word.

Orville Schell, a China expert at the Asia Society in New York, said: “Is [it] a bad thing for Maher to read the news on Chinese TV? There are many people doing corporate PR. Is that a bad thing?''

But Maher, he said, surrendered any guise of objectivity this year when he accepted the highest honour granted by the Chinese government to foreign experts — the Friendship Award.

Many see Edwin Maher as a maverick and entrepreneur. “He figured out a niche — it sounds like a good thing for him,'' said Joan Bieder, a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, who specialises in TV reporting, writing and production. “Most Americans,'' she said of Maher, “would say he's a sellout.''

Before becoming the voice of China, Maher had no desire even to visit the country. He was too busy riding a successful career as a reporter and announcer.

After his wife died, he developed a second career as a voice trainer. Then one evening, while fiddling with his shortwave radio at home, he heard voices in tentative English giving the news in China. He wrote the station an e-mail as a joke, offering his services as a pronunciation coach.

The station took him seriously and offered him a job. After consulting his grown children, Maher made the leap.

He worked for China Radio International for six months before being offered a job for CCTV. The job paid less than half of what he was making in Australia but he relished the challenge.

Initial pressure

At first, he felt enormous pressure, knowing millions were watching the station's newest effort at legitimacy. Friends said he licked his lips too much on-air.

But Maher soon found his rhythm. Along with his reports, he is the station's voice coach. A rail-thin man with oversized glasses, he prefers to take buses, not taxis, as a way to meet locals and continue his Chinese-language studies, which he calls “the hardest thing I have done in my life''.

Over time, he said, he has seen the station become less rigid. There has been a slight move towards balanced news, he said.

“It was a bit of balance. It's getting better. The door is opening a little wider.''