Olympics: CPJ urges Bush to highlight jailed journalists
CPJ wrote an open letter to President Bush today, calling on him to raise the issue of China’s jailed journalists when he gets to Beijing. We put the current number of journalists behind bars at 26, which makes China the largest jailer of journalists in the world, the dubious distinction it has held since 1999.…
CPJ urges Bush to raise concern about jailed Chinese journalists
Dear President Bush, We are heartened to hear that on Thursday, before embarking for Beijing to attend the Olympic opening ceremony, you will deliver a speech in Bangkok reiterating U.S. commitment to press freedom and other human rights. The Associated Press, which reported on the prepared text of your speech, also said that you are expected to raise these issues with China’s leaders once you arrive in Beijing.
Olympics-China Media Watch: Nationalist fervor and the Olympics
Basketball star Yao Ming carried the Olympic torch through Tiananmen Square today in the triumphant final leg of a relay fraught with protest. His long-legged saunter under the gaze of Mao’s portrait captured headlines in today’s Web news outlets, along with speculation about who will light the torch at the opening ceremony of the Games on Friday. Also…
Olympics: Dark skies for Games? Maybe ‘Sunshine Government’ can clear them
Yesterday, I posted two pieces that showed how China’s good intentions toward the media can go wrong, or never get under way in the first place. The first item described a Reuters report on new guidelines that had been handed down to the police about how to handle the media if an embarrassing demonstration should…
Olympics: An Olympian Challenge? Getting There
Visas into China have been hard to get since early this year, when new policies were instituted. The tighter restrictions had already hit me in late February, when I tried to get a tourist visa to visit my wife’s family in Beijing. I was in Hong Kong to launch the 2007 edition of CPJ’s annual…
Police in China detain, beat Japanese reporters; Reuters staffer threatened
Hong Kong, August 6, 2008—Reporters covering the aftermath of Monday’s attack on a border police outpost in Kashgar have been detained, beaten, and harassed, according to international news reports. Japan’s Kyodo News Agency reported today that police in Kashgar dragged Masami Kawakita, a photographer from the Chunichi Shimbun newspaper’s Tokyo headquarters, and Shinji Katsuta, a…
Olympics-China Media Watch: All the (good) news fit to print
All the news is excellent in China today. The Web site of Xinhua News Agency today leads by telling its audience: “Olympic dream brightens the world.” At the provincial levels, the news is equally good, but with a local angle. The Web site of the Southern media group reports that cooperation between south China’s Guangdong province…
Olympics: Police get rough in Kashgar
Police in Kashgar apparently didn’t get the message about new tactics for relating to the media. Japan’s Kyodo News Agency reported that Masami Kawakita, a photographer from the Chunichi Shimbun newspaper’s Tokyo headquarters, and Shinji Katsuta, a reporter for Nippon Television Network’s China general bureau, were slightly injured when police in Kashgar dragged them from…
Statement on police abuse of journalists in Kashgar
We issued this statement from Hong Kong after learning of reports today of the detention and beating of two Japanese reporters, Masami Kawakita, a photographer from the Chunichi Shimbun newspaper’s Tokyo headquarters, and Shinji Katsuta, a reporter for the Nippon Television Network, and the harassment of Reuters reporter, Emma Graham-Harrison, in Kashgar in China’s Xinjiang…
Olympics: Damaging video leads to new police rules
International advocacy may have had a role in prompting the reported new rules for police in dealing with journalists covering demonstrators during the Games, but the most likely cause was the damage to China’s international image from the widespread video of cops roughing up a few Hong Kong camera crews.