The new boss of CCTV, China’s state TV network, Hu Zhanfan, says it like it is.

He believes Chinese journalists should first and foremost be the Chinese government’s mouthpiece and those that don’t play ball won’t go far.

“The first social responsibility and professional ethic of media staff should be understanding their role clearly and be a good mouthpiece.”

Hu, a former newspaper editor, made these comments several months ago, but they only started causing a stir among Chinese web users over the weekend when the original Xinhua News report was posted on Weibo, China’s most popular microblogging site.

One web user compared Hu to Nazi propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels.

Below are pasted some of Hu’s comments from that Xinhua report, translated by the University of Hong Kong’s China Media Project.

“A number of news workers have not defined their own role in terms of the propaganda work of the Party, but rather have defined themselves as journalism professionals, and this is a fundamentally erroneous role definition. Strengthening education in the Marxist View of Journalism and raising the quality and character of news teams is not just very necessary, it is a matter of extreme urgency.

“Concerning social responsibility and professional ethics, editor-in-chief Hu Zhanfan believes that the first and foremost social responsibility [of journalists] is to serve well as a mouthpiece tool. This is the most core content of the Marxist View of Journalism, and it is the most fundamental of principles.”