All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Oddly, Nine Inch Nails Don't Make Cut: Hillary Clinton wants you – yes, You! – to pick her campaign theme song. Idolator has the nominees. Among them: "Get Ready" by The Temptations, "Rock This Country!" by Shania Twain, and my personal favorite, "Right Here, Right Now" by Jesus Jones. A year ago I noted how presidential candidates were releasing their (alleged) iPod playlists to the press corps to generate a little puffy coverage. On Hillary's was Aretha Franklin's "Respect," the Eagles' "Take It to the Limit," and U2's "Beautiful Day," which is also in the running for the campaign theme song slot.

Christopher Cross: Have you been watching the rather insane Christopher Hitchens anti-Jerry Falwell cable tour? It's harder to take one's eyes off than a piano-playing cat. Start with this video of Hitch on CNN with Anderson Cooper, in which he calls Falwell "such a little toad," a "horrible little person," and one of the "evil old men." And then check out Hitch's even more amazing appearance on "Hannity & Colmes," which closes with Hitchens saying "If you gave Falwell an enema, he could be buried in a matchbox." (Fishbowl DC explains.) If XM needs an even more controversial replacement for "Opie and Anthony", might I suggest Hitch and Patrice O’Neal?

Blog Trouble In Little China: The United States military may be cracking down on bloggers, but, after a protest, China "has abandoned plans for a law requiring all Chinese blog service providers to ask their users for verifiable personal details before they can start blogging," according to the Wall Street Journal. Apparently, all those folks surfing the series of tubes have been causing a bit of a headache. Notes the Journal: "The Internet has been a decade-old challenge for China. While it has brought the country commercial opportunities…it also has surprised the government with its ability to connect citizens and let them access foreign news and distribute sensitive information."

If every blogger in the United States who insulted institutions like organized religion or public figures like President Bush was tossed into prison, well, we'd have quite an overcrowded prison system. And we wouldn't really have much of a democracy, either.

In Egypt, however, after a five-minute court session, a blogger was sentenced to four years in prison for insulting Islam and insulting the country's president, Hosni Mubarak.

According to BBC News, "Egypt arrested a number of bloggers who had been critical of the government during 2006, but they were all subsequently freed."

And while the prospect of "Internet addiction" here in the United States might generate an amusing story on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, in China, your parents might send you to rehab for it.

As countries like South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam have taken legislative measures to limit the amount of time teens spend online, China has gone far further than just banning youths from Internet cafes – the government is helping to fund eight inpatient Internet addiction rehab facilities across the country.

Few patients (from ages 12 to 24) are at one facility willingly. "Most have been forced to come by their parents, who are paying upward of $1,300 a month -- about 10 times the average salary in China -- for the treatment," writes the Washington Post. Treatment entails "a tough-love approach that includes counseling, military discipline, drugs, hypnosis and mild electric shocks."

The Skinny Today: The Pentagon is very upset about the successful test of an anti-satellite missile by China. Plus, it's cool and hip to be an ethical member of Congress. The Skinny is Hillary Profita's take on the top of the news and the best of the Web.

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Let's Call The Whole Thing Off: Another day, another Osama/Obama mix up, this time from Yahoo News. TPM Café's Greg Sargent has the details. Despite an plausible-sounding explanation for what happened posted in the comments section by a Yahoo! representative, TPM Café readers are crying conspiracy. "Well, it looks like the media are going way out of their way to get this into people's subconscious," wrote one commenter. Claimed another: "Every one of these 'mistakes' is a smear with deniability attached to it."

Bring Out The Good China? "A new era of journalism in China is upon us!" We'll believe it when we see it. Still, some good news: The Chinese government has gotten rid of laws that restrict the movement of foreign journalists through China. "Before Monday, the foreign press needed government authorization to report from a location other than Beijing or Shanghai. Under the new laws, aimed at accommodating the Olympic foreign press, reporters are able to report and conduct interviews all over China without permission," reports Flumesday.com. Worth noting: "[A]s soon as the new rules took effect Monday, both NBC and the New York Times sent additional journalists to China." Tibet, incidentally, is still off limits. And the old restrictions are scheduled to come back after the Olympics end.

For All You Job Seekers Out There: A citizen journalism Web site in Canada is looking for a sex trade worker to cover the trial of an accused serial killer. For some reason. Qualified applicants, it should be noted, need the "ability to tell compelling stories for no pay." According to the site's editor, there have already been a few applicants.

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There' a pretty important news event in 2008 may prove problematic for the media organizations that will be covering it. No, not that one. Instead, we're talking about the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. As we've mentioned many times before around here, China's restrictions on press freedom are pretty substantial. Months ago, the Associated Press noted that many activists had been squawking about the issue, particularly with regard to how China's restrictions would play out during the Olympics.

The Wall Street Journal today points out that Beijing has agreed to "temporarily relax limits on foreign journalists from Jan. 1, 2007, through Oct. 17, 2008, saying they will be free to roam the country to report on the Olympics 'and related matters.'" But it's unclear where traditional limitations will come into play.

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CBS correspondent Barry Petersen has been based in Tokyo since 1995 and has reported extensively about the challenges facing the media in China. Today he weighs in on changes in the way journalists are allowed to operate in there and whether they will lead to permanent reform. Here’s Barry:


BEIJING: What China-based foreign correspondent would not love a front-page headline like this one in the English language China Daily:

“Journalists Promised Wide Access in 2008”

It’s about new rules that basically upend many of the strictures that foreign journalists have lived with for decades in China.

Example: the new rules say we can travel outside Beijing on reporting trips and local officials cannot ask: “What are you doing here?”

(There are two stated exceptions to the rule: travel to Tibet, where they have an independence movement, and travel to the western province of Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region – where they have an independence movement. You get the idea.)

The current rules mandate that before we go anywhere outside the capital we must get “permission” from the local officials in the area we plan to visit. On nice stories, permission is often granted.

But talk about doing a story on something like China’s pollution problems and, suddenly, everyone is just terribly busy. Sorry. Not allowed to visit.

And foreign journalists are easy to track. Whenever foreigners check into a hotel they must show their passport and their visa. Our visas say, “Journalist.” The first question from the front desk is…where is your official escort?

Come without one and the hotel clerks will call the local cops and, bang, someone shows up to shepherd you onto the next flight out of town - after they have confiscated your tapes.

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Wikipedia and China are two of our favorite subjects, and the uneasy meeting of the two is the topic of a fascinating story in the International Herald Tribune. Turns out the online encyclopedia, which can be edited by anyone, hasn't gone over all that well with China's censors, and they've frequently blocked access to the site. But Chinese Wikipedia continues to grow "by leaps and bounds" anyway.

It's not quite the same as its American counterpart, however. Entries in Wikipedia China on topics such as Mao Zedong and Taiwan are watered down and sanitized – there's no mention of murder or famine in the Mao entry, for example. The Tiananmen Square massacre doesn't show up at all. And this isn't, as one might think, simply a question of censorship - it's bigger than that. As the IHT notes, the people editing the entries are products of the Chinese educational system, which "provides a neatly sanitized national perspective on sensitive aspects of the country's past." Combine that with the fact that foreign Web sites are often blocked and the media is strictly monitored by the state, and you're left with a situation in which objective information is hard to come by. Many Chinese simply don't have enough information available to them to make their version of Wikipedia more accurately reflect reality.

And even if they did, they'd have to be careful, as China is infamously intolerant of political dissent. The IHT story notes a homegrown online encyclopedia in China called Baidu Baike which apparently copies much of its content from Wikipedia, but makes sure it stays on the right side of government overseers. The editorial policy is centered on not "judging the existing national system with malice." And what, exactly, does that mean? Zhang Yan, a spokesman for the company, explained it to the IHT like this: "Anyone who is Chinese knows."

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The Skinny, Hillary Profita's take on the top of the news and the best of the Web, appears daily here on Public Eye and on the "Evening News" page at CBSNews.com.

The Wall Street Journal's front page features one more chapter in Starbucks' master plan to take over the planet: conquering China. The overwhelming obstacle there is that most Chinese people, um, drink tea.

But Starbucks executives didn't become the Starbucks executives that they are by letting that deter them from an emerging market. No, writes the Journal, "executives didn't think the coffee part stood in their way."

Indeed, if you shovel enough milk and sugar into it, pretty much anyone will chug a latte five days a week. So, Starbuck's has begun to execute plans to lure the young people into their clutches – by counting on "a new generation of Chinese with growing spending power and an appetite for high-status brands" who will soon become as addicted as you and I are.

And many are already being sucked in. Warren Guo, "a 30-year-old who works in foreign trade," told the paper that he doesn't actually like coffee. He comes to Starbucks because there are "many girls."

Runway model Fang Sun Yan "started coming to Starbucks to meet friends. Now she says she's grown 'a little bit addicted' to coffee and visits as often as three times a week." We were all "a little bit addicted" at the beginning, my friend.

The president of Starbucks Greater China shared this philosophy with the paper: "Coffee represents the change," said Wang Jinlong. Remember that quote. In the film that will be created 25 years from now, about why the Earth was renamed Starbucks, that will be the tagline.

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There are certain jobs that are dangerous by their very nature. Fireman. Drug smuggler. Bodyguard. And then there are jobs that really shouldn't be dangerous, and yet are – in some countries at least. In the latter category is the job of reporter, which, in China, is the third most dangerous profession, after miner and policeman.

Reuters reports that a Shenyang hospital has now set up a foundation to help injured journalists, who "are obstructed, scolded, even beaten during interviews" in China. Early this year, a newspaper editor died as a result of a beating he took from traffic police for exposing high fees for electric bicycle licenses.

Interestingly, Reuters wrote this report off of a dispatch from Xinhua, China's official news agency. One wonders if the agency's decision to publish news about the dangers faced by journalists will have consequences for those involved. It's also important to note that, for journalists, working in China isn't just dangerous – it also carries the risk of going to jail. According to Reporters Without Borders, the country, which monitors news closely and censors reports it doesn't like, leads the world in jailing journalists.

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“China's highest court announced rules this week under which officials who give journalists ‘improper’ news will face severe punishment, the official New China News Agency said. Information will be released only through a newly created system of court spokesmen.”

That’s what the Washington Post reported today, in yet another example of the Chinese government exerting control over the media. More interesting was a line came further in the story: “It was unclear how the new rules differed from the old ones, as Chinese courts already refuse to release verdicts and basic information.”

Just this weekend, China announced some other new regulations that would give its state-run news agency, Xinhua, “control over distribution within China of news, information and other services from foreign agencies. Xinhua said it would delete items deemed to violate national unity or social stability,” wrote the Associated Press. Basically, that means more instances of the mysterious disappearance of tank man and the other mysterious disappearance of that Falun Gong protestor that heckled Hu Jintao’s public visit to the White House back in April.

None of this news is particularly surprising, as China has quite a history of clamping down on the press (one that we’ve documented in a slightly obsessive manner.)

What’s interesting, however, is that this slew of developments to manage and control press freedom more closely in China are happening in advance of a major international news event taking place in Beijing – the 2008 Olympics.

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