MCLC: foreign journalists self-censorship

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: pjmooney <pjmooney at me.com>
Subject: foreign journalists self-censorship
***********************************************************

Source: New Republic (12/9/13):
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115851/censorship-china-how-western-jour
nalists-censor-themselves

China's Government Is Scaring Foreign Journalists Into Censoring Themselves
By Emily Parker, New Republic, Dec. 9, 2013

“The visa question has insidious ways of sowing the seeds of
self-censorship,” Dorinda Elliott, the global affairs editor at Condé Nast
Traveler, wrote on ChinaFile <http://www.chinafile.com/spiked-china> last
month. “I am ashamed to admit that I personally have worried about the
risk of reporting on sensitive topics, such as human rights lawyers: what
if they don’t let me back in?” Elliott is a longtime China hand who worked
as Newsweek’s Beijing bureau chief in the late 1980s. “My decision to not
write that story—at least not yet—proves that I am complicit in China’s
control games,” she continued. “After all, there are plenty of other
interesting subjects to pursue, right?”

The most shocking thing about Elliott’s statement is its honesty. Western
journalists are not supposed to make any concessions to China, and even
when they do, they rarely admit it. Many people were thus horrified by
recent reports that Matt Winkler, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News,
spiked an investigative piece
<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/09/world/asia/bloomberg-news-is-said-to-cur
b-articles-that-might-anger-china.html> about one of China's richest men
out of fear of offending the government. (Winkler denied killing the piece
and said it is still under consideration.)

People are understandably angry about the Bloomberg reports, but they
shouldn’t be surprised. This is all part of a larger story. China may
force some two dozen correspondents from The New York Times and Bloomberg
News to leave the country by the end of the year, apparently in response
to their investigative reports on the familial wealth of the Chinese
leadership. “Chinese officials have all but said that American reporters
know what they need to do to get their visas renewed: tailor their
coverage,” The New York Times wrote. On Thursday, Vice President Joseph
Biden, who was visiting Beijing, said he had “profound disagreements” with
China’s “treatment of U.S. journalists.” As China more harshly intimidates
foreign reporters, incidents of Western self-censorship will only
increase. Bloomberg is not the first case, and it will not be the last.

These cases are often not as black-and-white as they appear to be in the
Bloomberg incident, where an editor apparently took an existing story and
shut it down. The story of self-censorship in China is a quieter tale of
unwritten articles, avoided topics and careful phrasing. There is also a
constant quest for “balance.” “Any sophisticated reporter is always
thinking about how to show things in their complexity,” said The
Atlantic’s James Fallows, “and that inner process of balance, which is a
healthy impulse, is inevitably affected by your knowledge of how
thin-skinned the Chinese government might be about any isolated bad-news
report.”

The once-vague threat of expulsion has, for many foreign journalists in
China, become a more tangible reality. Last year, Al Jazeera English's
Melissa Chan was expelled. And just this fall, Paul Mooney, who had been
reporting on China for 18 years, was denied a visa to be a China-based
correspondent for Reuters. Neither journalist was given a reason for the
punishment.

James McGregor, a journalist, author and businessman with more than two
decades of China experience, told me that fear of visa refusals indeed
does influence foreign reporting on China. “As the Chinese reaction gets
more and more aggressive, foreign reporters in China get more and more
wary. These are people with wives and husbands and children in school, and
to not get your visa renewed can upset your whole life. It’s in the back
of people’s minds.”

A Beijing-based reporter for a major U.S. newspaper, who requested
anonymity for fear that the Chinese government might cancel his visa (yes,
that really was his reason), put it this way: “Sometimes you can feel that
you have a limited amount of ammunition and you ask yourself: Do I want to
spend it all on this one mission that might not yield anything and will
leave me vulnerable, or on knocking out these other targets?”

“Topics like [ethnic and political unrest in the far western province of]
Xinjiang, Tibet and Falun Gong are really low percentage stories for
foreign correspondents,” he added. “You might get a great story but then
be expelled from China or suffer when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
decides to delay giving you a new visa until the very last day of the
year. There are all sorts of ways they can make your life miserable and
they increasingly do this—it’s part of an increasingly assertive China.”

 “There’s no way to know precisely where the line is, much less when you
might go over it, except by means of delicately tuned antennae,” said
Orville Schell, who has written many books on China and is the director of
Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations (where I was formerly a
fellow). “But once you’ve crossed over into the observation zone of the
Party, you know it, and the question of denied access cannot help but come
into your calculations about what you say and what you write.”

Paul Mooney, the journalist who recently was denied a visa for Reuters,
doesn’t know when he crossed the line. It could have been his reporting on
AIDS or Tibet, or the fact that he worked on the dissident Chen
Guangcheng’s English-language memoir. He told me that he didn’t pull his
punches in China, simply because he didn’t see the point of being there if
he couldn’t write what he wanted. Other Americans advised him to be more
pragmatic. “Even over the past year, waiting for my visa to come through,
journalist friends, academics and China watchers said to me, stop posting
critical things on Facebook,” he said. Many foreign journalists do their
Chinese visa applications in December, to get them in before the end of
the year. Mooney told me that a European journalist approached him for an
interview recently but did not plan to write a story until after his own
visa had been renewed. “How many foreign journalists are doing the same
thing every year at this time, or are now doing this throughout the year?”
Mooney wondered.

Countless Chinese journalists do this all the time. Of course, for them
the stakes are much higher: They could end up behind bars.
“Self-censorship is in my blood,” an outspoken Chinese Internet dissident
once proudly told me. His years of carefully dancing around political land
mines kept him out of exile or jail. Murong Xuecun, a writer and an
increasingly bold critic, recently admitted: “I often remind myself: Don't
engage in self-censorship, and I was confident I had succeeded in this,
but so far I have not yet written a single article about Tibet issues,
even though I lived in Llasa for three years; nor have I openly discussed
Xinjiang issues, even though they are of great concern to me.”

This is not to say that all Western reporters censor themselves in China.
Over the past year or so, there has been startlingly bold reporting.
Oft-cited examples include David Barboza’s Pulitzer Prize winning
reporting on the riches acquired by the family of Chinese premier Wen
Jiabao, and somewhat ironically, Bloomberg’s own investigation into the
wealth of the relatives of President Xi Jinping. Those news organizations
paid a price for their reporting, but others write on sensitive topics and
emerge unscathed. In 2010, Evan Osnos, former Beijing correspondent for
The New Yorker, did a profile of the Dalai Lama
<http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_osnos>, and
he didn’t get the boot. Some writers are less fearful of expulsion because
they are not career China hands, or perhaps because they are China hands
who have just had enough. Jeremy Goldkorn, a Beijing-based blogger and the
director of the research firm Danwei, told me, “Every time I apply for a
visa or leave the country and come back in, the thought always passes
through my mind that maybe this time it’s not going to work. But I've been
in China for so long, that I’m thinking it would be a good thing if they
kicked me out.”

These examples don’t paint a complete picture of Western writing on China,
however. Furthermore, writers who do calibrate their criticism are not
necessarily moral cowards with Chinese business interests at heart. Some
fear that if they are kicked out of  China, they will lose touch with the
ever-changing realities on the ground. This makes it harder to accurately
convey those realities to the outside world, and to write prose that will
resonate with Chinese readers. Today an article by the foreign press can
be translated into Chinese and go viral on the mainland, something that
was inconceivable ten years ago. A post with a Chinese translation of an
article I wrote for this publication, on a sensitive attempted murder
mystery 
<http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113116/zhu-ling-attempted-murder-case-w
eibo> no less, soared to #1 on Weibo, where it was retweeted over 125,000
times. Despite a strict censorship regime, the power of social media helps
explain why Chinese authorities are so nervous about Western reporting.

Self-censorship reaches across various industries. Hollywood studios who
want to show their films in China submit them
<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/15/business/media/in-hollywood-movies-for-c
hina-bureaucrats-want-a-say.html>to censors in advance. Authors will agree
to cuts 
<http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/22/author-chinese-censorship-den
-xiaoping-biography> in order to get their books sold on the mainland.
Some students at Princeton
<http://chronicle.com/blogs/worldwise/the-long-shadow-of-chinese-blacklists
-on-american-academe/33359> who  are interested in China turn away from
internships or dissertation topics related to Chinese democracy and human
rights. Scholars whose institutions have Chinese partnerships may face
additional pressures, says Elizabeth Economy, senior fellow and director
for Asia Studies at The Council on Foreign Relations. For example, “an
objective of promoting U.S.-China cooperation could rapidly become
synonymous with avoiding sensitive political topics that might upset the
Chinese side and thereby hinder cooperation.”

It’s unrealistic to expect journalists to be immune to the temptations of
self-censorship, especially at a time when China is turning up the heat on
both individual reporters and entire news organizations. Last week,
Chinese authorities showed up at Bloomberg’s bureaus in Shanghai and
Beijing for unannounced “inspections.”
<http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2013/12/02/chinese-authorities-conduct-unan
nounced-inspections-of-bloomberg-news-bureaus/>  A Bloomberg reporter was
also barred 
<http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/03/bloomberg-reporter-barred-f
rom-press-event-with-chinese-premier/> from a press event with Li Keqiang,
China’s prime minister. The New York Times website remains blocked in
China, as does Bloomberg’s, whose Chinese terminal sales have slowed.
There is no easy solution to self-censorship, but we can start by having
an honest conversation about the fact that its arm reaches much farther
than Bloomberg News. “I have a certain sympathy with Matt Winkler,”
Orville Schell said. “I understand his dilemma. I live his dilemma.
Indeed, many of us who deal with China--whether journalists, scholars,
diplomats, businessmen or film makers--live his dilemma, and it would be
disingenuous to plead otherwise.”
Emily Parker, a senior fellow at The New America Foundation, is the author
of “Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices From the Internet Underground,”
which will be published in 2014 by Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus &
Giroux.