All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Another week, another story of Journalism in Peril abroad.

But where last week’s story was that of Venezuelan President and noted America-critic Hugo Chavez pulling the plug on TV stations, this morning’s Washington Post shows an ally of America taking umbrage at the Fourth Estate. In Pakistan, there is a significant uprising against President General Pervez Musharraf, and the results are beginning to resemble the sixties here in America – riots, rallies, and demonstrators getting shot by police … and, as the ultimate battleground, the media.

Since the beginning of March, Musharraf (you may remember him from sipping tea and being a genial guest on “The Daily Show”) has been combating criticism for his suspension of Pakistan’s Chief Justice, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudry. Chaudry was nearing decisions on some cases that were going to be crucial to Musharraf’s re-election bid, and those rulings were suspected to be critical.

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"Chief Military Censor" is right up there with "Propaganda Minister" on the list of job titles that make journalists squirm.

But Israel has a chief military censor, Col. Sima Vaknin, and she has significant power over the press. "I can, for example, publish an order that no material can be published," she told the Associated Press. "I can close a newspaper or shut down a station. I can do almost anything."

Vaknin's presence means that military news Israel does not want out – like a failed missile attack, for example – can be suppressed. If news outlets refuse to abide by her office's rules, they are not allowed to operate in Israel. The AP and other news organizations have agreed to the rules in order to keep reporting from the country.

I spoke to CBS News Senior Vice President of Standards and Special Projects Linda Mason about whether CBS News has agreed to the same rules. She says it has, but that "this isn't exactly what it seems."

"To get a press card you do have to sign an agreement," she says. "It applies to strategic military information that we might get unilaterally. During the last war in the 90s – the Iraq war – Israelis asked that press not pinpoint where the rockets had landed. Which makes sense – otherwise the enemies could correct their aim."

If the AP reports something, we report it," she continues. "If we get something unilaterally and we can't get the Israeli military to confirm, we call the censorship office, which confirms, denies, or asks us to word it in a different way."

According to the AP, "Reporters are expected to censor themselves and not report any of the forbidden material...When in doubt, they can submit a story to the censor who will hand it back, possibly with deletions."

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OK, OK, at this point, China is pretty much officially an obsession for us. But from a media perspective, is there anywhere on earth more interesting? You've got a country desperately trying to manage the flow of information to its citizens at a time when technology is making it easier and easier for that information to get through. Impossible? You'd think so. But that's not stopping the Chinese from trying.

The latest example comes to us via the New York Times, who informs us, in its clever headline, that "Little Sister Is Watching":

Part traffic cop, part informer, part discussion moderator — and all without the knowledge of her fellow students — Ms. Hu is a small part of a huge national effort to sanitize the Internet. For years China has had its Internet police, reportedly as many as 50,000 state agents who troll online, blocking Web sites, erasing commentary and arresting people for what is deemed anti-Communist Party or antisocial speech.

But Ms. Hu, one of 500 students at her university's newly bolstered, student-run Internet monitoring group, is a cog in a different kind of force, an ostensibly all-volunteer one that the Chinese government is mobilizing to help it manage the monumental task of censoring the Web.

In April that effort was named "Let the Winds of a Civilized Internet Blow," and it is part of a broader "socialist morality" campaign, known as the Eight Honors and Disgraces, begun by the country's leadership to reinforce social and political control.
Under the Civilized Internet program, service providers and other companies have been asked to purge their servers of offensive content, which ranges from pornography to anything that smacks of overt political criticism or dissent.

Chinese authorities say that more than two million supposedly "unhealthy" images have already been deleted under this campaign, and more than 600 supposedly "unhealthy" Internet forums shut down.

And how's this for a staggering sentence: "Having started its own ambitious Internet censorship efforts — a "harmful-information defense system," as the university calls it — long before the government's latest campaign, Shanghai Normal University is promoting itself within the education establishment as a pioneer."

Congrats, Shanghai Normal! After all, there is nothing that a university must defend against more strenuously than that great scourge known as information.

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Considering that there are enough news outlets from all over the world available to provide daily fodder about media for this blog (and about a bazillion others) it isn't easy to imagine what it would be like to find out that the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television has heretofore “prohibited local TV and radio stations from using international news coverage from foreign news services.” Welcome to China. United Press International reports:

From now on, local broadcasters must restrict their coverage of overseas events to reports generated by state-run China Central Television and China Radio International.

The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, in a notice on its Web site, warned news broadcasters to "strengthen their political sensitivity" and avoid using footage taken from international satellite services, the South China Morning Post reported Thursday.

"Recently, some overseas news services and media have used various methods to sell international news material to domestic stations, and the reports have a clear political intention," the administration said.

The media watchdog said the rule was designed to "ensure a healthy and orderly development of international TV news reporting and maintain a correct propaganda direction."

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