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Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom 22 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
Beijing Olympics 2008: Winning Press Freedom 23 print media to insure that nothing very sensitive is leaked. Authorities use state secrets and security laws as a last resort for the criminal prosecution of journalists. The law carries its own particular barbs. It allows suspects to be held for months, even years, without access to a lawyer. It allows extension after extension of pretrial detention. And it often brings steep jail terms. Mo Shaoping, a veteran Beijing lawyer who has represented many jailed journalists, told the Committee to Protect Journalists earlier this month that “there has been no reduction in cases where subversion charges are brought against people for articles they have written. If anything,” Mo said, “these cases have increased in the past one or two years.” It is clear that China’s promises for a freer media in time for the Games in August will not be fulfilled. Beijing and the International Olympic Committee have failed to follow through on the pledges they made to the world in 2001. Even though Chinese journalists have been abandoned by the International Olympic Committee, we should make it clear to them that they still have the support of their colleagues as they attempt to expand the media universe in which they live and work. We should use the internationalist spirit of the Games to deliver that message to them in the coming months.
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