Editor&Publisher: China: Going For The Gold In Press Tyranny

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China: Going For The Gold In Press Tyranny
With the Summer Games less than a year away, Beijing continues to permit the harassment of foreign journalists -- and to jail its own press.
By Mark Fitzgerald

CHICAGO (September 18, 2007) -- Back in 2001, when China was awarded the right to stage next year's Summer Games, Wang Wei, executive vice president of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games, assured foreign journalists that they would have complete freedom to do their work.

How's that working out, six years later? Ask Dan Griffiths, a correspondent with the BBC World Service. A couple of weeks ago, he took a ride to a village about three hours south of Beijing to check out reports of protests against the local authorities. He was there for just a few minute before the police swooped in....Griffiths' experience is not unique, says the Paris-based press freedom organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF for its initials in French).... RSF says, in a poll of 163 foreign journalists based in China, conducted earlier this year by the Foreign Correspondents Club of China, fully 40% of correspondents reported some kind of interference in their work by authorities.

Since the first of the year, journalists have reported 157 such incidents to the club -- including violence, threats, arrests, surveillance, and intimidation of sources. This treatment does not bode well for the ability of the foreign press to work freely in when the Olympics open next September, RSF says....

Of course, if it's this bad for foreign journalists, it is much worse for the brave Chinese who dare to report the truth. The Committee to Protect Journalists says China is imprisoning 28 journalists right now. RSF counts it at 35, with another 51 "cyberdissidents," mostly bloggers who ignored the government's call for "discipline" online.

What little international protest there's been over this treatment of journalists has fallen on deaf ears. Beijing simply ignored President Bush's pleas to release New York Times researcher Zhao Yan. Zhao was finally released last weekend after spending every hour of his three year sentence on ludicrous bribery charge in jail. But why should Beijing worry about a protest from Bush, when the president so eagerly took up the invitation to attend the Games that was extended by these enemies of the press?...

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