Get Real is in China this week working with Chinese journalists in a large provincial capital not far from Shanghai. Our assignment here is to help teach these radio and television reporters, producers, and editors something about the way the media works in the U.S. and how that might apply here. In many ways things aren’t much different.

Yes the media is owned and controlled by the government but in most day-to-day operations that doesn’t really effect what these professionals do. As in the U.S. the media here is consumed with ratings, celebrity, competition shows, and the competition. And just like America much of the news here is about sports and entertainment stars coupled with stories about government and business news. The big difference, of course, is that the life-blood of American cable news is missing here: Criticism of the government and especially it’s highest ranking officials.

That difference has come into sharp focus this week as the central government in Beijing has put a blogger and a writer on trial for trying to help the families of the victims of last year’s devastating Sichuan earthquake. The scale of the quake’s toil is unimaginable to most Americans. As many as 87,000 people died. At least 10,000 of the dead were schoolkids who died when their classrooms collapsed in daylight tremor. Critics noted that recently-constructed school buildings fell apart while others built at roughly the same time stood. Parents began protesting almost immediately arguing persuasively that government officials in charge of construction allowed schools to be improperly built in exchange for kickbacks.

The central government has fought hard to squelch these protesters including using the army to prevent a group of parents from traveling to Beijing. And of course none of this has been covered by the Chinese media. We knew this but asked anyway: How did your organization cover the Sichuan earthquake? The answers were telling in ways that we didn’t expect.

The first answers were that the news organizations focused on the human toll — how many were still missing, how many needed food and housing. When we asked about the protests and anger among many of the people in the effected region, we were asked how we had covered Katrina. They were able to go into great detail about the failures of the American government there. We asked them how they knew about all this. The answer was obvious.

We went on to explain in great detail how the American media told the story of New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina. We showed videos of the coverage immediately after the storm passed and investigative pieces that ran in the weeks and months following. We talked about how various media outlets stuck with the story and helped drive a nationwide soul-searching about our government. We told them the political fallout from Katrina, especially to the Republican Party.

In private conversations later we pressed to find out how these media professionals thought about this. Were they secretly chafing under government control? Did they look for ways to get around the restrictions? Did they feel this system was holding back their country? The answers were surprising.

They talked about their ability to do investigative stories on local corruption and how that was really more important to people than criticizing the central government because it was closer to their daily lives. They cited stories on the local bus system in this city and a local businessman who was involved in corruption. But they also bristled at the idea that the national government should be criticized in the way American news organizations do. Clips of Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly were met with stunned silence.

Certainly there are people here who are fighting to open China and we wouldn’t expect to find many of them working in the state-run media. And it’s no surprise that a proud people would defend their country to what they might perceive as an challenge from a foreigner (see O’Reilly, Limbaugh, Hannity, etc for the American version of this). But we suspect there’s more here.

Social critics in the west have long argued that our consumer culture accomplishes strong top-down social control by distracting the masses from what the people in power are doing. Whether you believe that or not, talking with young people here certainly makes the argument more persuasive.

The young (25-35) people in our training sessions couldn’t really conceive why they would criticize the central government. They wanted to learn how American Idol and Dancing With the Stars worked and how their own shows like Happy Girl 2009 and Do You Remember? could be better. They wanted to know how we were putting shows on cell phones and the internet. One told us that she reads the New York Times website every day and therefore knows what’s going on in the world. She didn’t really have much interest in news from Beijing critical or otherwise.

It made us think a bit about what’s happening in America where television news and newspapers are dying accelerating deaths. The audience for both is getting older and smaller by the day. Younger Americans long ago turned away from these traditional news sources, instead turning to the internet. Whether on their cell phones, netbooks, or work pc’s, this generation, like their Chinese counterparts, seems to have little appetite for being told what’s news. They make their own decisions.

So does that make China less likely to ever allow criticism of the government? Or will the flood of information available on the web simply overwhelm their heavy-handed attempts at censorship? (Facebook, You Tube, Vimeo, Twitter, etc. are all blocked here.) And will this generation of Chinese people change it all without really meaning to?

The earthquake here was devastating not only in lives lost but also in the loss of face. If the Beijing Olympics were the peak of modern Chinese pride, the earthquake was the hard slap in the face for many here that reminded them that their country has still not “arrived” as a fully modern First World nation. To be sure everyone we talked to knew about the protests in Sichuan and the shameful building practices there. They just didn’t want the rest of the world to know too.