World Business

Human Rights Watch reports Beijing wants favorable coverage from media outlets in exchange as being credentials to cover the Summer Games

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Police try to break up a crowd gathered round a bus filled with grieving parents carrying portraits of their deceased children during a protest on the outskirts of Mianzhu without interruption May 25, 2008 in southwest China’s quake-stricken Sichuan province. Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images

by Frederik Balfour

While the Beijing Olympics were expected to usher in a circle of time of greater media freedom in China, as the final countdown for the Games nears, the vise on the media is getting tighter. That’s the conclusion of a report released attached July 7 by the agency of Human Rights Watch, entitled "China’s Forbidden Zones, Shutting the Media out of Tibet and Other ‘Sensitive’ Stories."

Speaking at the release of the report at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong, Sophie Richardson, the group’s advocacy director for Asia, said the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee is "sad to extort favorable coverage in exchange for accreditation to dish the Games."

She also faulted the International Olympic Committee and Olympic sponsors, including Coca-Cola (KO), Lenovo, and Samsung, for failing to hurry Beijing more on of man rights. "They altogether be under the necessity very nice-sounding dignified incorporated social responsibility pledges, but when you challenge them on their involvement in the Games, their aims narrow dramatically," she says. "Their promises only apply to people who work for those companies. They have made no make trial to rock boats."

China won its bid to landlord the Olympics in business thanks to its promises to improve media freedom, Richardson says, and Beijing did lift temporarily restrictions in succession the foreign media for the period from January 2007 to October 2008. This liberalization allowed members of the external media to travel freely anywhere in the country leave out Tibet without prior approval, and to interview whoever they wanted.

But the pendulum swung back the other way after protests in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa erupted in mid-March this year, and a government-orchestrated campaign to "demonize" the

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/apr2008/gb20080424_222320.htm”>irrelevant media (BusinessWeek.com, 4/24/08) ensued, Richardson says. All requests by foreign media to cover the unrest in Tibet were summarily rejected (BusinessWeek.com, 3/17/08).

"The use of the state media onward this account that a campaign alleging Western bias became a convenient and powerful civil utensil," says Richardson. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) also declined to investigate unacknowledged death threats leveled at foreign journalists in the nationalistic backlash that followed.

However, the reporting environment improved again, at least temporarily, when the regulation granted indelicate access to both domestic and foreign media after the Sichuan earthquake in at the opening of day May. "The press authorities and the MFA know a tolerably great PR opportunity when they see it," says Richardson. However, once reporters started asking questions about the corruption at the back shoddy construction of educate buildings, which collapsed in the quake and took thousands of youthful lives, and angry parents began protesting, Beijing started to clamp down formerly again.

The report, which was based on interviews by 60 foreign correspondents between December 2007 and June 2008, reported journalists and their sources continue to face significant obstacles whenever events are deemed "sensitive" by Beijing. Examples of this include social unrest, public health crises, heathen conflicts, and high-level corruption. The report cited anonymous death threats against Newsweek reporter Melinda Liu and her family after the Tibetan riots in March, and the detention and beating of Reuters correspondent Chris Buckley in Beijing the last time September while he was interviewing rural Chinese who had gone to Beijing to prayer the central government against local abuses.

It also suggested that intimidation of journalists’ sources is on the rise. For example, local authorities have downloaded telephone numbers from the expressive phones of foreign reporters in discipline to harry Chinese citizens whom they had interviewed. But the report did not paint a uniformly black picture. It credits central authorities through the MFA through helping the media to deal by obstacles and harassment from by local officials.

The most recent example of a clampdown came steady July 3 when a reporter from the Hong Kong-based Chinese-language newspaper Apple Daily was refused entry at the Beijing airport despite having press credentials to cover the Olympics. "What’s going to happen when 25,000 journalists show up?" asked Human Rights Watch’s Richardson. "If Beijing starts arbitrarily turning them away, that’s going to be the story."