THE MEDIA’S METHODS OF MERIT AND MAYHEM

As President Richard Nixon sped across the Pacific on Air Force One in February 1972, the American reporters accompanying him on his historic trip had no idea what to expect. “It was a little bit a feeling of ‘we are leaving Earth and going deep into the cosmos of some distant planet’,” CBS reporter Dan Rather told documentary filmmaker Mike Chinoy decades later.

To many of the journalists shaping American public opinion, the nation they called “Red China” was a land of mystery and misery, a closed society, a “cloistered kingdom,” a pitiable pauper rather than a nation with a rich, long-standing culture stretching well beyond that of the U.S. “I knew nothing about China,” legendary broadcast journalist Barbara Walters admitted to Chinoy. “It