China Central TV Culture Show: A New Low

I'd not watched it in several months but yesterday evening's Culture Express on China Central TV (CCTV) 9 - the English channel - was as poor as anything I've seen broadcast in China. Bland, cheap and lacking much in the way of genuine culture, the half hour show's longest item was a report on Cameron Diaz getting her star on the Hollywood walk of fame. No word of Michael Jackson't death: It didn't seem to matter that the rest of the world was mourning the death of a pop star. But most galling is that the show seems to ignore all of the interesting things - there are many - happening in Chinese traditional and modern arts. The show's amateurish graphics and boring scripts suggest either laziness or lack of money. Strange that it would be the latter, given the huge sums of government money being spent on international-looking English media to burnish China's image.  

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