News Probe - Development

Development

The maiden broadcast of 'Oriental Horizon'(東方時空) on May 1, 1993 signified the start of the broadcast of commentary programme on current affairs. One year later, on April 1, 1994, a similar programme Focus(焦點訪談), which means a talk show on the hottest topics, was broadcast. At the prime time of 9p.m. on May 17, 1996, the first episode of News Probe-- "Hongzhi Ban"(宏志班) was broadcasted. The programme 'News Probe' is produced as a result of the ongoing development of such kind of programme. The founders of 'News Probe' expected this programme to report in a much detailed, in-depth, objective, systematic and authoritative way.

During the past developmental years, the production team found a position for the program. News Probe is thus aired as an investigative doucumentary, not only a commentary one.

The reason of setting up this position is due to the vast competitions from other news programmes in CCTV. Focus(焦點訪談) provides detailed and universal description for different news events while 'Oriental Horizon'(東方時空) is good at rousing audiences' emotion during news reporting. Besides, the broadcasting time of News Probe is beyond all these news programs. Therefore, what News Probe can do is to provide innovative reporting methods so as to raise audiences' interests. As a result, an investigative reporting style was developed.

At the earlier stage of the program, the criteria on choosing the program topic are known as the slogan of "Sanxing" (三性), which means whether the topic is worth reporting, editing into program and investigating. However, in most cases, the three criteria are separately considered and only part of them are fulfilled. Afterwards, four methods of choosing a topic have been developed, known as the investigation on the theme, consensus, event and the inside skinny.

Being an investigative documentary, the News Probe raised the slogan of "hunting the truth", which consists of 2 layers of meaning. Firstly, to uncover the inside skinny which is concealed by some people or organizations, and those secret incidents which harm the public interest. News Probe thus also includes some reports involving wrongdoings by governmental departments, such as corruption in the Chinese Police. Secondly, News Probe also aimed at providing deep discussion on the complex problems that being investigated.

The production crew does not aim at generating any conclusion for each episode. Instead, it allows the audience to make their own judgements after viewing the programs.

Since News Probe has been developed into an investigative documentary, it has its own characteristics:

• The reporters of News Probe must cultivate a sense of investigation
• The core part of the program is the process of investigation but not only the description of the event
• The investigation process is initiated by the suspension of reporters on certain events, and it ends when the suspension is proved.

To cut in short, the performance of the reporters during the investigation process determines the quality of the investigative documentary, therefore, reporters should be able in appling different methods depended on different situations in order to carry out a good programme .

Reporters of the programme must also reach several criteria of the production crew. They must be:

• rational in order to investigate the events in objective manners;
• able to exchange ideas and examine issues at the same time;
• able to look into issues in audiences point of view;
• fair to all the parties involved in the events and should be unbiased to certain parties; and
• able to raise questions towards every parts of the events