Today's Saying Story Selection ④: 2005 Edition

Author: CCTV Today's Law Program Team
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-04-01
Features: Documenting the progress of China's rule of law in bits and pieces, teaching the public about law through specific and vivid cases. Wang Xinzhong, the producer of Today's Law, once shared a story—seven years ago, he walked across a young man's "land boundary" with a smile as he left the TV station's west gate. Such incidents had long been commonplace for them. On a Monday, he heard that the young man had hanged himself from the crooked tree near the west gate. From that moment, crossing the "land boundary" became a lingering sense of guilt that he couldn't shake off. That guilt has persisted to this day.
I understand that a person's sense of responsibility should have an anchor. Different levels of legal programs have different tasks and functions. Today's Law should be an intermediate course—you can't make it too high-level, or it would lose its mass appeal. In reality, there are often two states between a TV program and its audience: one is where the program educates the audience, creating a top-down or bottom-up dynamic; the other is the so-called "audience is god" approach, where the audience dictates what they want to see. I don't agree with this. The audience is certainly not god, and neither are we, the creators. The relationship between creators and the audience can be seen as both adversaries and friends. Only with a level gaze can we be friends, engage in dialogue, and foster mutual exchange.
So, who is god? In legal programs, "the law" is god, and the program is god. In this way, our perspective relative to the audience shifts to an equal one.