From a Xinhua article on media training at the Central Party School, as noted by Danwei, this passage:

"Candidness not only woos media, but also the people, and it is needed because the public are not to be fooled," [course instructor Gao Xinmin] said. "The media are our friends, and not enemy. We should respect them because their mission is to seek and report truth."

From David Bandurski's interesting report on the quashing of coverage of negative coverage of the unpopular digital TV rollout (also via Danwei):

According to a CMP source, the Central Propaganda Department issued a ban early last month on all coverage criticizing the rollout of DTV services in the country. Censors, the source said, singled out a December 7 editorial from the official Xinhua News Agency’s Xinhua Daily Telegraph. The article was called, "Overbearing ‘digital TV’ harms our self-respect."

It seems not everyone is reading from the same media management playbook. Wonderful media skills will only ever be so desirable if you can simply switch off coverage you don't like. The path of least resistance will still be to resort to the big guns of censorship, especially for departments or politicians with any kind of real power. Until a more open (and less corrupt) media environment makes real media skills a necessity for politicians, I doubt that much of the Party School's curriculum will really sink in.

More useful at the Central Party School might be the upper-division course, "How to deal with uppity foreign media that you can't censor." Imagethief graciously volunteers to help.