| Sunday, February 04, 2007 |
| Is the murder of Lan Chengzhang a warning to China's media? |
For Lan Chengzhang, 35, it was the first month of work with his newspaper, the China Trade News.
While he sat in a car outside the office of a mining company in Shanxi Province in China, two of his colleagues ventured inside to make inquiries.
Lan Chengzhang, the reporter, had taken on what anyone in the area knew could be a dangerous assignment - investigating the illegal coal mines that have proliferated in the sooty hill country of Shanxi Province.
Within minutes, a gang of men armed with crude weapons set upon Lan, beating him up so badly that he died within a few hours.
Though severely beaten up, Lan's colleague from the China Trade News survived to tell the tale.
Attacks against journalists are not uncommon in China, even if deaths are rare. But in ways that few could have expected, the murder of this untested reporter for an obscure publication on January 11, 2007, has become a watershed event.
Reporters and editors across China are seeing the murky case as a warning against their booming but troubled profession.
Lan's death has become a national event. Chinese President Hu Jintao, in an unusual statement a few days afterwards, demanded that justice be done.
But it also highlighted the culture of corruption that many journalists acknowledge pervades the industry, particularly the practice among some reporters of demanding money from subjects to avoid damaging articles.
President Hu, who has spoken often of the need for the government to strengthen its control over the news media, has not been seen as a friend of journalists.
After several days of intense commentary about the killing in the international news media and on Chinese blogs and websites, Hu may have been compelled to protect his country's image.
Inside the Chinese news media, introspection over Lan's killing has been unusually forthright, mixing criticism of the government with harsh self-examination.
While Beijing is condemned for limiting the scope of honest, aggressive journalism, journalists themselves are being condemned - indeed by themselves - for giving in to corruption as a professional way of life.
"This kind of control and degeneration are inseparable," Zhang Ping, a veteran reporter at Southern Metropolis magazine, said. "The control dims the hopes one has for a career in journalism, and many reporters, such as people at Xinhua (news agency), don't have any honourable feelings from being a journalist. They get no rewards the normal way and discover that in China only lie-telling can bring you income."
Huang Liangtian, who was recently dismissed as editor of Baixing magazine because of its probing investigative style, was more caustic in his assessment. Said he: "China basically doesn't have any journalists in the real sense. Everybody is part of the machine, a propagandist for the party's policy."
In fact, the scope for reporting has expanded significantly in the last decade, causing worry to the Chinese government. But along with the explosion in the number of titles have come strong commercial pressures, bringing about what many describe as a compulsion to mix newsgathering and advertising.
Many reporters say they are given revenue quotas they must meet by selling news coverage to the subjects they write about.
The issue of this sort of corruption has emerged as a major subtext of the discussion of Lan's death.
In Datong, the city where Lan was killed, he was quickly labeled an impostor - the implication being that he had visited an illegal coal mine to shake down its owner, promising not to write about him in exchange for a payment.
Lan's newspaper itself added little clarity to the picture. While acknowledging that he was employed there, the paper denied that he had been assigned to write about illegal coal mines.Labels: media |
| posted by a correspondent @ 6:50 AM |
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