The power and the purpose: Media for a shared future

Editor's note: Andy Mok, a special commentator for CGTN, is a professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for China and Globalization. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

On November 6, in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, the Global South Media Partnership Mechanism Inauguration Meeting and the 13th Global Video Media Forum (VMF) is convening. Around 300 participants – officials, editors, producers and executives from across the Global South – have gathered to consider a question that has never been more urgent: What is the responsibility of media in the governance of an interconnected, contested world? The stakes reach far beyond professional ethics. They touch the foundations of how societies see themselves and how nations understand one another.

The power

Walter Lippmann, a famous American journalist, called it the world outside and the pictures in our heads. The world, he wrote, is too vast and shifting for anyone to grasp directly; we live instead through images and symbols that stand in for reality. These pictures, largely supplied by media, guide how we think, vote and act. Reality, in effect, reaches us only after it has been pictured. Whoever shapes those pictures shapes the public mind.

Edward Bernays, the architect of modern public relations, carried that logic to its pragmatic conclusion. "Those who manipulate the organized habits and opinions of the masses," he wrote in Propaganda, "constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country." To him, persuasion was not an aberration of democracy but its operating system.

Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, writing a generation later, stripped away the moral debate and spoke of environment rather than intent: The medium is the message. Each new medium – printing press, radio, television – does not simply deliver content; it remakes consciousness. Our tools of communication become the architecture of perception itself.

Together, these thinkers reveal the elemental power of media: Not merely to transmit information but to reorder reality – to determine what people can see, feel and imagine.

The purpose

In the West, the purpose of media evolved into something instrumental: To influence, to sell and to organize. It became a machinery of persuasion, bound to the circuits of profit and power. The same techniques that once marshaled the public's will for war were later used to market soap, ideology and celebrity.

But for the Global South, standing at the crossroads of development and digital transformation, the purpose of media must be reimagined. It cannot be limited to amplifying consumption or echoing external narratives of progress. Its higher calling is moral and civilizational: at first, not merely to sell, but to steward trust; additionally, not to manufacture consent, but to create coherence – a shared understanding of development, dignity and destiny.

If Bernays taught us that media organizes the public mind, then the Global South must use that same power to organize mutual understanding: to tell stories that knit together fragmented perspectives and reveal the human texture of growth.

The responsibility

To speak of "media in global governance" is to recognize that storytelling is now a form of statecraft. Narratives shape legitimacy as surely as laws do. The Global South, home to the majority of the world's population and to most of its emerging growth, has a duty to speak in its own voice and to do so credibly.

That requires three disciplines: integrity of source – truthfulness that earns belief, especially when the world is awash in synthetic noise; plurality of view – space for multiple civilizations to be visible without being flattened into sameness; and continuity of purpose – a commitment to long-term storytelling that traces progress, not just spectacle.

Telling compelling stories of development, then, is not public relations; it is public reasoning. It means portraying development as lived experience: Farmers who digitize their markets, students who leap from local classrooms to global research networks and engineers who build infrastructure that carries not only goods but hope. Such stories show the dignity of building, not merely the drama of conflict.

Toward Xi'an

Xi'an, the ancient capital where the Silk Road once began, is a fitting host. Then as now, it stands at the meeting point of civilizations, where information, goods and ideas traveled together. The Global South Media Partners Mechanism Inauguration Meeting inherits that legacy which is to create a new connective tissue of trust among societies that have too often been defined by others' words.

If media power once belonged to those who controlled the presses, the transmitters and the algorithms, the new purpose belongs to those who can wield that power with moral imagination – to help humanity see itself whole.

The media's power, in short, is to shape what people can imagine for themselves. Its purpose is to ensure that imagination serves truth, dignity and common destiny. And that, ultimately, is the work of governance itself.

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