Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom - World Press ...

Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom
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a reputation for tolerating little political criticism from the city’s media, while media in
Guangzhou are aggressively commercial.
The propaganda department operates under the control of the Politburo Standing
Committee, which gives it a great deal of authority. The department and its local branch
offices monitor appointments of media managers and tell managers via telephone and
e-mail which issues to stress in reports and which topics to avoid. Groups of senior cadres
working in “monthly evaluation small groups” critique news coverage seen as inaccurate
or politically undesirable. News content is also monitored by a newspaper’s own
employees. Their job is to keep their organizations from making political “mistakes.” The
propaganda department's hold on the media is further facilitated by collaboration with the
General Administration of Press and Publications and the State Administration of Radio,
Film and Television. Both of them regularly issue regulations, reminders, and reprimands.
It is interesting to note that the daily and sometimes hourly directives handed down by
the propaganda department are no longer always delivered by e-mail. Increasingly,
directives are given by telephone, so that there is no electronic trail of the department’s
messages. We have been told that the method changed after some of those messages
appeared in the publication Falling Short, the Committee to Protect Journalists' report on
the Olympics.
Penalties for editors and reporters crossing the censors’ line are mostly administrative.
Serious infractions are noted in their employment record. If a publication steps too far out
of line, it may be shut down or see its staff “reorganized.” These are not uncommon
practices. Each year, several high-profile publications disappear, or offending staff are
demoted and shuttled off to publications where they can have less impact.
Within China’s commercial press, the payment system for journalists is another method of
content control. At most papers, reporters receive bonuses when their articles are
published, and those bonuses make up the bulk of their income. The end result is that
staff reporters are more likely to go after stories that will make it into print, or at least
cover them in a way that will not offend the censors. Although there is tremendous
competitive pressure to pursue stories that will grab readers, editors know that they
cannot push the boundaries too often before they and their papers come under scrutiny.
Journalists who do go too far and are taken to trial are generally charged under the 1988
laws intended to guard state secrets. These provide a catch-all basis for punishing any
citizen for disseminating information deemed sensitive. Among the general categories it
lists as secret are major policy decisions on state affairs, national defense and military
issues, diplomatic activities, national economic and social development, science and
technology, investigation into criminal offenses, and “other matters that are classified as
state secrets by the state secret-guarding department.” The State Secrecy Bureau can
simply decree that given information is secret, even after it has entered the public domain.
The vague outlines of this law are the greatest stumbling block in efforts to build true
watchdog journalism in China. As we have seen, for journalists the law is almost
superfluous; there are enough social and administrative controls in online, broadcast, and