ESSAY: 4.22 MISTS AND MOUNTAINS!

If you watch CCTV news often (not recommended but feel free to peruse the CCTV Follies) you get a Spidey sense, a tingly feel, a premonition for the dramatic moment when Xi is about to show. Enjoy!

Today’s news opens with mountains and mist which is the merest hint of things to come. Yes, it’s gonna be more of the usual over-blown, grandiose, personality-cult perpetuating story about China’s paramount leader, a visionary with a plan for shared humanity.

But pause for a moment to consider the hard-working CCTV editors who have to churn out this sometimes stiff, sometimes fluffy stuff on a regular basis, day in, day out, in a way that is pleasing to the leader.

When personality cult is done well, it has at least some tangential relationship to the news, but getting the reverential tone right and putting to use stirring, lofty images favored by the core of the party is more important than any journalistic convention.

Xi personality cult material can take up as much as one-third of the tightly-scripted half-hour evening news program Xinwen Lianbo, and Xi being Xi, and CCTV program protocal being what it is under the iron fist of his deputies, Xi always appears at the top of the news.

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