Earthquake Opens Gap in Controls on Media(New York Times)

mandarin

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: May 18, 2008


         SHANGHAI  — Two and a half hours after a huge earthquakestruck Sichuan Province on Monday, an order went out from the powerfulCentral Propaganda Department to newspapers throughout China. “No mediais allowed to send reporters to the disaster zone,” it read, accordingto Chinese journalists who are familiar with it.

When the order arrived, many reporters were already waiting at aShanghai airport for a flight to Sichuan’s provincial capital, Chengdu.A few were immediately recalled by their editors, but two reportersfrom the Shanghai newspaper The Oriental Morning Post, Yu Song and WangJuliang, boarded a plane anyway. Soon, they were reporting from theheart of the disaster zone.

Their article filled an entire pageof the next day’s Post, one of the first unofficial accounts of thetragedy by Chinese journalists. It included a graphic description ofthe scene and pictures of a mourning mother, a rescued child andcorpses wrapped in white bunting. The paper further risked offendingcensors by printing an all-black front page that day, stressing thescale of the catastrophe.

The earthquake has tested this country in many ways, including adeath toll that has steadily climbed into the tens of thousands and thelogistical nightmare of reaching isolated hamlets in a mountainousregion with narrow, treacherous roads.

One of the biggestchallenges, though, is to the country’s sometimes sophisticated,sometimes heavy-handed propaganda system. China’s censors foundthemselves uncharacteristically hamstrung when they tried tomicromanage news coverage of the earthquake, as they do most major newsstories in China.

By Wednesday, so many reporters had ignoredthe government’s instructions that the Propaganda Department rescindedits original order, replacing it with another, more realistic one,reflecting its temporary loss of control. “Reporters going to thedisaster zone must move about with rescue teams,” it said, givingtacit, retroactive approval to freer coverage.

One reporter fromThe Oriental Morning Post, who spoke on the condition that he not beidentified because the workings of the propaganda system are oftentreated as state secrets, described the widespread defiance as“stepping beyond the boundaries collectively.”

He described withpride the proliferation of articles that had suddenly appeared, adding,“clearly they were not just from Xinhua,” China’s official news agency,which under propaganda rules generally has a monopoly on firsthandreporting of major breaking news events.

Another Shanghaireporter, who arrived early on the scene and also spoke on condition ofanonymity, described his trepidation at having violated the censors’orders. He initially asked his editors to keep his byline off hisdispatch. “I was afraid they would track me down,” he said. “But then Ifound it was fine, not just me, a lot of reporters were actually doingthe same thing. Everybody was free to move and free to write whateverthey could.”

China’s censors operate in secret. Their orders areissued verbally to senior editors at thousands of newspapers, Web sitesand television outlets so that there is no written record of theirmandates, editors say. The Propaganda Department does not have a publicaddress or phone number and does not answer queries about itsoperations.
A handful of publications consistently skirt theedges of censorship on delicate topics, like land disputes,environmental problems and corruption. But editors who regularly defythe letter or the spirit of propaganda guidance are punished, replacedor sometimes prosecuted.

Coverage of major accidents, epidemicdiseases and natural disasters has long been a source of contention.Editors and some officials have argued publicly that overly restrictivepropaganda controls can result in deaths if people remain uninformedabout risks.

Even so, efforts have been made in recent years torestrict the leeway the news media have to report on major eventsviewed as having the potential to “disrupt social order,” reporters andeditors say.

When China’s worst railroad accident in a decade occurred last month,killing 72 people, propaganda officials jumped in quickly, barringreporters from all but the central government’s tightly controlled mainnews organs from providing original reporting. With few exceptions,Chinese newspapers limply complied.

Similarly, during a prolonged storm that buried much of usuallyclement southern China in snow and ice last winter, the country’s newsmedia were slow to pick up on the scale of the crisis and initiallyprovided little aggressive reporting from swaths of the countrysidethat were essentially paralyzed.

But there have been antecedentsto last week’s blush of independent reporting. The clearest example ofdefiance in the face of clear orders from the Propaganda Department mayhave occurred during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. ManyChinese news organizations, including the leading state televisionoutlets, reported freely on those student demonstrations until theywere crushed by Chinese troops and strict censorship was restored.

If last week’s events and those of 1989 have little in commonpolitically, they do share a deep and wide claim on people’s attentionsand emotions throughout China. An editor with the Shanghai Media Group,a television company, conveyed the intensity of interest in earthquakenews in terms of viewership, saying interest levels were too high toheed orders from above to discourage frontline reporting.

“Thisis about China,” said Shi Hong, the coordinator of the network’s newsprogram on the earthquake. “Our rating right now is at four. That’s notdoubling the usual rate, it’s 400 percent of the norm. The executiveshave instructed us to go deep into the frontline and send back vividimages of Shanghai people participating in the damage relief up there.”

Forall of this aggressive reporting, nearly all of China’s news coveragehas shied from exploring politically delicate questions related to theearthquake, such as the widespread collapse of school buildings,preferring to stick instead to the safer story lines of heroic rescuesand human tragedy.

“So many criticisms that one can see onlinehave not been reflected in the mainstream media, such as why the airforce was activated so late and why foreign rescue teams were notallowed in earlier,” said Li Datong, former editor of the weeklynewspaper Freezing Point, who was removed for his outspokenness.

GuZexu, a commentator in Guangzhou, who wrote a column in the newspaperXin Kuai Bao urging the opening of the country to foreign aid teams,said there had been no real breakthrough by the Chinese media in thecurrent crisis.

“You still cannot have criticism in the opinionpages, but you can advise,” Mr. Gu said. “How you phrase things alsomatters. You touch upon something and leave it, or you must makecircumlocutions.” The media have been faster and more efficient in thiscrisis than in many others, “but there has been no big difference incontent,” he said.

Indeed by midweek perhaps the most prominent story line had become a celebration of the prime minister, Wen Jiabao,who moved many Chinese with his shows of sympathy for the victimsthroughout the crisis, spending long hours traveling in the quake zoneand listening to the stories of some of those who had been hardest hit.

Although it has been consistently pro-government, the coverage of Mr.Wen may have broken new ground, when online messages from someone whoseemed to be a news reporter covering the prime minister’s relief workmade their way from the Internet into a newspaper, the Guangzhou Daily.

Information about China’s leaders, including seemingly trivialdetails, is traditionally the most tightly controlled news of all. TheGuangzhou Daily report said Mr. Wen had hurt himself in a fall and wasbleeding, but refused medical assistance.

“The premier isshouting into the phone,” the reporter’s account of a conversationbetween Mr. Wen and army generals said: “ ‘I don’t care how you do it.I just want those 100,000 people out of danger. That is an order.’ ”


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/world/asia/18press.html?pagewanted=1&ref=asia