China marshalls army of bloggers
Updated
Foreign journalists covering the Olympics in Beijing have been giving the organisers almost daily grillings on their freedom to report the Games.
There were angry exchanges over the beatings of at least three international reporters trying to cover protests in the capital and elsewhere in China. But analysts say the 16-thousand foreign reporters in China at the moment are wrong if they believe their presence will make a lasting difference to media freedom.
Presenter: Corinne Podger
Speaker: David Bandurski, reporter for Far Eastern Economic Review; Sophie Richardson, Human Rights Watch, Washington
PODGER: The Games organisers and the International Olympic Committee have been caught on the back-foot several times at daily press briefings in Beijing, by foreign journalists angry they're not enjoying the broad freedoms they were promised. It's led to hostile exchanges in the press room. But if the foreign press think they're making a permanent difference in China, they're wrong. That's the view of David Bandurski, a media analyst and reporter for the Far Eastern Economic Review, based in Hong Kong. He says Chinese reporters at the Games aren't getting anything like the relative freedom of Western reporters - nor, he says, did they expect it.
BANDURSKI: Chinese reporters understood from the beginning - I mean, they understood seven years ago, when these promises were made, that these promises were not about them at all. And ever since that time, ever since Beijing was awarded the Olympics, all Chinese journalists have understood that when the Olympics rolled around, they would be subject to tighter controls, not more real openings.
PODGER: China's media has opened up considerably over the past decade or two; it now includes newspapers and magazines that aren't government-controlled, as well as internet chatrooms and blogs. It's meant Beijing's encountered stronger criticism than in the past, from a much larger range of sources.
BANDURSKI: We've had huge growth in the number of newspapers and magazines. They're no longer most of them supported by the government; they're supported by advertising, and this in itself created a new dilemma in the mid-1990s, and so they created new mechanisms like the news commentary group in the propaganda department, which was not just prior censorship - which was censorship how it worked in the past, but actually a group of officials who would look at what they called propaganda discipline, after reports came out. Because sometimes the commercial media would push the envelope, and they'd think more about readers and what readers wanted to see, and they'd think more about advertising dollars, than they would about the propaganda discipline.
PODGER: Some news websites are listed on NASDAQ, and walk a tight loyalty line between government and shareholders. That's not so much of an issue for blogs and chatrooms, but their sheer number's made them a challenge to monitor. Websites and blogs can be shut down or blocked - but the government has a second line of defence - a sophisticated army of web commentators paid to drown negative comments in a tidal wave of support for the party line, and to steer online chat away from sensitive subjects. David Bandurski says they're known as the "Fifty Cent Party", because it's been rumoured that's what they're paid per positive post.
BANDURSKI: This is really the latest innovation responding to the growth of the internet. Censors, you'd call them in some of their capacity, but also they're sort of designed by the party as a new form to really amplify the party messages, or pro-party messages, in chatrooms and on the internet.
PODGER: It's estimated Beijing employs in excess of 280-thousand people - some of whom provide positive commentary, while others monitor blogs and report back to government. Many are freelancers; working outside party offices - but formally trained by the Information Office of the State Council. Together with the Great Firewall of China, and web police, they're helping put into practice what President Hu Jintao recently called "a new pattern of public-opinion guidance". It's made blogging an increasingly risky business - as Sophie Richardson, Asia Director for Human Rights Watch in Washington, explains:
RICHARDSON: We have seen people while the Olympics have been on, getting into trouble for things, for subjects they've discussed electronically. Immediately prior to the Games opening, we're very concerned that a blogger named Huang Qi was formally charged with inciting state subversion for posting a few pieces on his own blog that speculated about the possibility of corruption as a contributing factor in children's death in the Sichuan earthquake. Somewhere, somebody along the line decided that Huang Qi shouldn't have said what he said online, and for that he stands a good chance of spending three and a half years in prison.
PODGER: But David Bandurski at the Far Eastern Economic Review says most web-users in China are more annoyed than frightened by the prospect that what they're reading and responding to, goes through an elaborate human filter.
BANDURSKI: There's a sense that the web commentators and their presence and their activity on the internet really further erodes the atmosphere of trust on the internet. And this of course is the issue overall, of public confidence in the media as a larger issue. We have fake news in China, we have of course propaganda; it's not the kind of atmosphere that builds trust, and makes people believe that what they're reading or seeing is true.
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