Organizing in Practice:

A Case Study of China Central Television News Center

Writing Sample
Wen Chen

Organizing in Practice: A Case Study of China Central Television News Center

Thirty-eight news programs in total, and nine news channels broadcasting in more than
fifteen languages over forty counties, China Central Television (CCTV) has become the largest
news broadcasters all over the world (China Central Television Research Laboratory, 2013).
Despite the countless news reports broadcasted each year, all of them are produced in a single
department, CCTV News Center, the solely authorized organization in CCTV that can produce a
news program. Due to its unique position in CCTV where the notion that mass media should
serve as a mouthpiece for the Party and state is highly promoted, the organizational
characteristics of CCTV News Center are quite different from many other worldwide news
agencies. This article, therefore, analyzes the organizational structure, culture, and use of
communication of CCTV News Center to gain insights into its unique operational process as
well as the news censorship in China.
The Background of CCTV News Center
CCTV-News Center was founded for reasons. In 1958, Beijing Television was founded as
the first television station in China, which changed its names to China Central Television later in
1978 (CCTRL, 2013). Initially, the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China
Central Committee issued directive censorship of programs, most of which are news broadcasts
propagandizing government policies and presenting peoples happy life. It is until late 1980s that
the Publicity Department adopted new standards and approaches for CCTV, loosing the previous
harsh control (Zhang, 2012). During this reform, CCTV was entitled to purchase a variety of
foreign and individual broadcasts with the exception of news programs. In addition, although the

Party did not issue directive control, CCTV was still required to prevent broadcasts of material,
especially news reports, containing inappropriate and negative content or holds against the Party.
As a result, the year of 1988 saw the foundation of the News Center when CCTV had an urgent
demand for a department, which can produce news program for the network, while at the same
time, issue effective censorship of its contents (Lin, 2011).
In response to the many social movements happened domestically and internationally in the
early 1990s, the leaders of the Party and CCTV determined to further enhance the censorship of
news programs. The News Centers exclusive authority to produce and censor news programs for
CCTV, consequently, became a rigid regulation until today. As a production department, the
News Center has various groups of journalists and editors responsible for different news topics.
They interview people, collect news sources, write and rewrite stories, and edit video clips. The
studios have already seen the creation of dozens of news programs, including News Simulcast
(Xinwen Lianbo), News 30 (Xinwen Sanshi Feng), Topics In Focus (Jiaodian Fangtan), and so
on. Meanwhile, as a censor organization, lots of positions in the News Center are accountable for
supervising and controlling broadcasts to ensure their political acceptability and correctness.
Organizational Structure
Since CCTV News Center is a part of the government, financially dependent on the state
rather than a private organization, we see its organizational design in significant accordance with
Webers bureaucratic theory (see Figure 1).
According to Weber (1947), a bureaucratic organization has a clear hierarchical system of
authority, division of labor, and a complete system of rules in terms of the rights, responsibilities
and duties of personnel. In the News Center, a single director appointed directly by the Publicity

!2

Department of the Party has the exclusive authority. Under his control, the center is arranged in
departments based on working goals. Each department has a supervisor, who assigns employees
to particular positions in the designated departments (Zhang, 2012).
For instance, in Department of News Contents, which is in charge of the production of news
stories, a journalist send a draft to his assigned editor, who then hands over the revised version to
his assigned chief editor. The chief editor either sends feedback to the editor for further revision
or makes the story as final script and ready for broadcast. These processes conform to Fayols
principles of unity of command, unity of direction, and scalar authority (1949). By embracing
these principles, CCTV News Center warrants the quality of inputs and outputs of news stories
as well as censors all the messages to ensure their political acceptability.
Furthermore, this bureaucratic design also determines the communication structure of the
News Center. The traditional approach treats structure as a channel system through which
information flows (Papa, Daniels & Spiker, 2008). Like previous example illustrated, CCTV
News Center has very clear and rigid patterns for upward and downward communication, the
horizontal communication that involves cross-department interactions, however, is uncommon. It
is a usual observation in the News Center that an anchor delivering news reports to his audience
directly has no idea about the author and background of the story.
This phenomenon can be interpreted by the critical approach. Critical theorists state that
organizational structure supports particular roles that govern communication relationships and
patterns in hierarchies (Papa at el., 2008). In CCTV News Center, anchors and journalists are
reporting to distinct supervisors, and belonging to their own department. The arrangement of
these position leads to the rule that anchors are only responsible for reporting stories, while

!3

journalists are solely working on writing stories. The rule, ultimately, limits the mutual
connections within organization employees, who seldom communicate with each other even
though they may be on the same producing line for the same product.
Organizational Culture
In the fundamental sense, a culture exists when people come to share a common frame of
reference for interpreting and acting toward one another and the world in which they live (Papa
at el., 2008). To understand the culture of organization, it is imperative to know that
organizations are actively engaged with, instead of being simply passively embedded in the
environment. The organizations are always intended to be influenced and present its culture both
internally and externally. Culture, as an accepted set of rules shared within an organization, is the
product of an interaction between external adaption and internal integration (Schein, 1991).
The hierarchical structure and the image of national news broadcasting representative of
CCTV News Center have configured the centralization in the organization. Unlike other many
new centers in the world, the environment of CCTV News Center is rather oppressive and strict.
Every piece of news collected by reporters requires a lot of administrative censorship procedures
with the purpose of warrant of scrutiny. Here the article takes a critical-interpretivist perspective
in studying and understanding the organizational culture of CCTV News Center.
On the one hand, critical-interpretivist researchers see organizations as places where
members develop shared and conflicting meanings to accomplish individual and organizational
goals (Papa at el., 2008). As the biggest news source serving for Chinese official television
channel, all of the members working for the News Center all work hard to live up to its national
organizational reputation. From critical-interpretivist perspective, the organizations also are the

!4

places of struggle over competing meaning systems (Papa at el., 2008). News groups will
compete to delve into the most breathtaking news sources to meet its performance goals.
On the other hand, the oppressions, which critical-interpretivist researchers emphasize
within the organization, can be seen in both organizational structure and censorship policies in
order to remain its dominant position in nationwide news presses. Different groups, which
subordinated to various news departments are supposed to remain on high alert in terms of
quantity and quality of both news input and output (Wang, 2006). Once the general topic is
decided by and delivered from the authorities, the news groups are expected to sacrifice their
personal time in order to remain good team evaluation and contribute to organizational goals.
However, it does not mean that each piece of collected news can be officially released or
delivered to national television channel, the censorship may kill the news report once the state of
affairs changed or sudden decisions made by authorities. Under such a unique organizational
environment, it is not a surprise that many temporary employees did not consider birthday parties
or excursions as representative of CCTV News Centers culture, instead, the competition and
conflicts within organizational environment further construct, and enact its hierarchical structure.
The Uses of Communication
Organization members simultaneously create meaning and social structure over time through
communication. Communication, therefore, establishes the interaction patterns that engage in
systems of normative control that guide actions of organization members (Papa at el., 2008). In
CCTV News Center, the major approach adopted to information transmission involves the
transmission of information from upper levels to lower levels of the organization hierarchy (Pan,
2000). This is actually decided by its hierarchical structure per se. In the organizations where

!5

messages and orders are mainly flowing from the upper levels, the communication is primarily
considered as simply a tool for coordination and managerial control, the messages transmitted
from the upper levels mainly functions for production and maintenance (Papa at el., 2008).
For better understanding the ways communication being used in the CCTV News Center, we
apply two organizational communication metaphors here: conduit metaphor and voice metaphor.
A conduit is a channel through which something is conveyed (Axley, 1984). In conduit
metaphor, the organizations are seen as containers and communication can be used as a tool for
accomplishing organizational goals though transmitting messages (Putman & Boys, 2006). This
perspective corresponds with the communication approach the CCTV News Center takes. As a
giant national news producing organization, CCTV News Center have weekly director meeting
which allows department directors to communicate, collaborate, motivate each other with ideas
and plans. Once decide the directions of the program, each director of departments would be
responsible for transmitting the decisions to lower levels in order to maintain the flows of
information. In such way, the communication in the News Center serves as a tool to make the
messages known to lower levels.
Another metaphor can be applied into the organization is voice metaphor. This metaphor
focuses on communication as the expression or suppression of voice in organizational life
through the social and political processes that produce and reproduce meanings, identities and
power relationships (Putman & Boys, 2006). The voice metaphor involves in the power
dominance, participance, marginality, voices of difference within organizations, and it may be
concerned with questions like, who has voices, and when and how is voice heard? As a
hierarchically constructed organization, the strict censorship policies of CCTV-News Center to

!6

some extent keeps lower levels voices from being heard. The upper level authorities in the
organization have access to thousands of propaganda orders each year, within which many
reported orders are chosen for satisfying some individual political and economical interest.
Qinglei Wang, the former CCTV News Center journalist once slammed the censorship of the
organization and said that, an upper level leader once joked with me, When youre choosing
topics for reporting, you have to weigh first. Basically, the news which you feel you ought to
report or want to report, thats the news you cant report (The former journalist, 2012).
According to Wang, some voices from lower levels which journalists hope to broadcast and the
attitudes they hope to express have been silenced over and over again by authorities due to the
sensitiveness of certain topic as well as the potential harms to interest beneficiaries.
Conclusion
The CCTV News Center was founded under the particular politico-economic conditions of
China where mass media is expected to disseminate more diverse information and maintain as
the mouthpiece of the Party and the state. This reality determines the News Centers functional
dyad, which in turn influences its organizational characteristics.
This article, from the perspective of organizational communication, analyzes the News
Centers organizational structure, culture, and use of communication. Firstly, due to its dualistic
mission and financial dependence on the State, CCTV News Center embraces Webers
bureaucratic theory to design its hierarchical structure, which further affects its communication
structures. Secondly, the article sees the News Centers organizational culture from criticalinterpretivist perspective, which involves in coordination and conflicts within organization
members. Finally, the conduit metaphor and voice metaphor allow us to gain better insight into

!7

its uses of communication, which is, the communication mainly serves as a tool to transmit
messages, including instructions and suppressions, from upper levels to lower levels in the
organization.
In conclusion, as the exclusively authorized organization in CCTV that produces and issues
directive censorship of news programs, the News Centers hierarchical structure, centralized
culture, and instrumental use of communication seem to be its natural selection. It is difficult
to argue whether such a design is the most appropriate or not. Rather, this article would like to
highlight the notion that organizational mission, to most extent, shapes its organizational
structure, culture, and uses of communication.

!8

Appendix
The Publicity Dept.
of the Party
Director of
the News Center

......

Dept. of
News Content

International
News

Division of
Sports

Chief
Editor
Editors
Journalists

......

Division of
Economic

Chief
Editor
Editors

Division of
Society

Chief
Editor
Editors

Journalists

Dept. of
News Production

Chief
Editor
Editors

Journalists

Studio 1

Directors
Anchor

Journalists

Figure 1: Organizational chart of CCTV News Center

!9

Studio 2

Directors

Anchor

Other
Studio Staffs

Other
Studio Staffs

Reference
Axley, S. (1984). Managerial and organizational communication in terms of the conduit
metaphor. Academy of Management Review, 9(1). 428-437.
China Central Television Research Laboratory. (2013). The 2013 yearbook of China Central
Television. Z. Hu. (Eds.). Beijing: China Radio and Television Publishing House.
Fayol, H. (1949). General and industrial management (C. Storrs, Trans.). London: Sir Isaac
Putman.
Lin, W. (2011). Zhong yang dian shi tai xin wen jie mu zhong xin de gai ban te se yu fa zhan ce
lue yan jiu [An analysis of the strategies of CCTV News Centers revision and
development]. Chinese Journalism, 4(6), 68-90.
Papa, M. J., Daniels, T. D., & Spiker, B. K. (2008). Organizational communication: Perspectives
and trends. (5th Ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Pan, Z. (2000). Improvising reform activities: The changing reality of journalistic practice in
China. In C. Lee (eds.). Power, Money, and Media (pp. 68-111). Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press.
Putnam, L. L. & Boys, S. (2006). Revisiting metaphors of organizational communication. In S.
R. Clegg, C. Hardy, T. B. Lawrence, W. R. Nord. (Eds.). The SAGE Handbook of
Organization Studies, Second Edition (pp. 541-566). Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Schein, E. H. (1991). What is culture. In P. J. Frost (Eds.). Reframing Organizational Culture.
London, UK: Sage.
The former journalist slams the censorship of CCTV (2013). Retrieved February 17, 2014 from
Wall Street Journal, Web site: http://cn.wsj.com/gb/20131203/rlw074209.asp
Wang, L. J. (2006). Analyzing the dynamics between organizational culture and change: A case
study of China Central Television (CCTV) in transition. (Unpublished doctoral
dissertation). University of Warwick, Coventry.
Weber, M. (1947). The theory of social and economic organization (A. M. Henderson & T.
Parsons, Trans.; T. Parsons, Ed.). New York City, NY: Oxford University Press.
Zhang, W. (2012). Zhong yang dian shi tai pin dao gou jian chuan bo ce lue yan jiu [The research
of channel construction and communication strategy of CCTV News Center]. Chinese
!10

Television Study, 2(1), 24-75.

!11