Adam Minter, Columnist

Chinese Reporter Auditions To Be Putin's BFF

CCTV's Putin reporter could hardly be expected to ask a question that might embarrass his the Russian leader. Instead, his job was to flatter Putin and to underscore to Chinese and global audiences the limits of American influence and power.

January 23, 2014 at 1:16 PM EST

By Adam Minter

Adam Minter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering the business of sports. He is the author, most recently, of “Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale."

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In a Friday morning news media kick-off to the upcoming Winter Olympics, Russian President Vladimir Putin sat in front of a semi-circle of invited reporters in Sochi, Russia. Playing the role of tough, bothersome Anglo-American journalists were ABC's George Stephanopolous and the BBC's Andrew Marr, who peppered the Russian leader with questions about corruption and Russia's notorious laws restricting so-called gay "propaganda .''

Of course, not all of the questions, or questioners, were quite so difficult. The two representatives of the Russian media offered up deferential softballs. When it comes to deference, though, few reporters anywhere -- and not just in Sochi -- can compete with Shui Junyi, the reporter assigned to cover Putin for China's state-owned CCTV network.

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