NEW YORK, Feb. 20, 2008— American Women in Radio and Television (AWRT) today announced that Mandarin broadcaster Wu Jing has won this year’s Gracie Allen Award for Most Outstanding Series.
Wu Jing’s eight-part series, “The Internet and Civil Rights in China,” was recognized for its “superior quality in writing, production, and programming.” She will accept her prize at the annual Gracie Allen Awards Gala in New York on May 28, along with winners in other categories from CBS, NBC, and CNN, among others.
“We are tremendously proud of Wu Jing and RFA’s Mandarin service,” RFA President Libby Liu said. “The exhaustive research for this series explored the incredible growth of the Internet in China over the last decade—such that now Chinese Internet users make up one-tenth of the world’s online population.”
Wu found that the Communist Party’s powerful Central Propaganda Department still wields decisive influence over much of what gets published in China.
The last decade saw the creation of 130 million netizens during an Internet boom that ushered in an era of unprecedented access to information and services. At the same time, the government itself was reporting thousands of incidents of civil unrest across the country, as official corruption spread amid lucrative property deals and the gap between rich and poor widened.
As Internet access has become more and more widespread, ordinary people have begun joining in discussions on forums, blogs, and chatrooms across the land, posting topics of interest and discussing them. Now, domestic news will often break online before it appears anywhere else, posted either by those directly involved, or leaked by journalists unable to publish through approved channels.
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