The following post by Nantong Dan Lihua (南通单利华), a petitioner from the Jiangsu city of Nantong, was deleted from Sina Weibo sometime before 3:04pm today, November 13, 2013. In the post, Dan reports being detained by a stability preservation official from Nantong city at the railway station in Beijing. Dan Lihua currently has with more than 1,300 followers on Sina Weibo. [More on deleted posts at the WeiboScope Search, by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre]
The deleted post, in which Dan tags the official Weibo of the Beijing police, reads:

Right now I’m in the North Plaza at the Beijing South Railway Station and I’ve been intercepted by seven people led by Liu Yi (刘毅), the head of the petitions office in Gangzha District, Nantong City, Jiangsu. I’m sitting on the cold ground. I’ve already dialed 110 to report my case to Beijing [authorities], but the police haven’t come. Please won’t you web users pay attention to my case. Thank you! My phone number is 13615235498.

The Chinese-language original follows:

我现在北京南站北广场被江苏南通港闸区唐闸衔道信访主任刘毅带领7人截访，我坐在冰冷的地上，已向北京110报案20分钟，警方不出警，请网友们关注申援！谢谢！我电话13615235498 @平安北京

NOTE: All posts to The Anti-Social List are listed as “permission denied” in the Sina Weibo API, which means they were deleted by Weibo managers, not by users themselves.

The following post by Kdnet.net (凯迪网络), the official Weibo account of the international Chinese-language web portal KDNET, was deleted from Sina Weibo sometime before 5:04pm today, November 13, 2013. The post reports the results of an online survey on the popular Netease web portal showing that 60 percent of respondents do not watch the official nightly news cast (新闻联播) on China Central Television, and more than 70 percent rate the program as “rather poor.” Kdnet.net currently has with more than 169,000 followers on Sina Weibo. [More on deleted posts at the WeiboScope Search, by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre]

The deleted post reads:

[A research report on CCTV Nightly News: More than 60 percent of web users don’t watch the program at all, and 70 percent say it’s poor!] Recently, China Central Television said its own satisfaction surveys showed that it’s Nightly News program was on top. Since the 1950s, the CCTV Nightly News has dominated prime time television for tens of millions of Chinese families. But survey results [from Netease] show that more than 60 percent of web users don’t watch it, and close to 70 percent believe it is rather poor. There’s a big gap between this survey and CCTV’s own investigation!

In fact, as users can see from the image below, posted along with the Kdnet.net Weibo post, that the survey results showed that only 10.8 percent of those surveyed by Netease watched the CCTV Nightly News either “every day” (2.9%) or “often” (7.9%).
The Chinese-language original follows:

【《新闻联播》调查报告：超六成网友根本不看 七成看者差评！】近日央视调查称新闻联播满意度居首。新闻联播自上个世纪50年代至今，牢牢占领了千家万户的黄金档，但调查结果却显示，超6成网友不看，看过的网友中，近7成认为比较差，这与央视自己的调查大相径庭！http://t.cn/8DD5hV4 网易图娱

NOTE: All posts to The Anti-Social List are listed as “permission denied” in the Sina Weibo API, which means they were deleted by Weibo managers, not by users themselves.

China’s chengguan, or urban management officers, non-police who are charged with such urban tasks as clearing away unlicensed street vendors or carrying out forced demolitions, have a horrible reputation in the country. Their name is synonymous with violence. But recently, the southern city of Guangzhou issued new regulations for its chengguan designed to spruce up their public image. Chengguan are now being told, for example, that they must begin interactions with the public by saying “Hello!”. In the following cartoon, posted by artist DSX (大尸凶的漫画) to Sina Weibo, three chengguan officers pose with an elderly street peddler who is forced to kneel on the street (presumably before they confiscate her goods). “Say ‘Cheese’!” they tell her tauntingly. The not so subtle sub-message: training chengguan in politeness is pointless and beside the point when they are tasked with the oppressive dirty work police want to keep at arm’s length.

Even the stars can be seen in Beijing skies at the moment. The wind raked through yesterday. The smog lifted.
Recently, as it seemed the smog would never clear, I surrendered and joined the ranks — I too bought an air purifier. After all, Doctor Zhong Nanshan (钟南山), the hero of SARS, said the smog in the north right now was more harmful than the epidemic a decade ago. You can’t just sit around, can you — breathing in those cancer causing particles and waiting for death to come?
At the moment, though, the smog in China’s media presents a more insoluble problem. As we approach China’s tenth Journalist’s Day on November 8, that smog is thicker than it ever has been. The foulness has a lot to do, of course, with the recent scandal surrounding New Express reporter Chen Yongzhou (陈永洲).
[1]
The Chen Yongzhou saga unfolded in three stages. Initially, the New Express supported its reporter following his cross-regional detention by Changsha police. It ran a bold headline, “Please Release Him,” on its front page. The next day, it ran another huge headline: “Again, Please Release Him.” These calls prompted a lot of attention, sympathy and support.
But the story took a dramatic turn after Chen Yongzhou was paraded out in handcuffs on China Central Television. He admitted to accepting money in exchange for a series of reports on the listed company Zoomlion.
The third stage was the counterattack against Changsha authorities and Zoomlion, in which critics questioned, for example, the right of the Changsha police to pursue the case across provincial borders.
There are indeed many problems with how the case has been handled. For instance: if the reporter is indeed suspected of accepting financial reward for his series of reports, then why is the charge her commercial libel and not bribery?
So I think it’s a fair point to say that greater scrutiny should be given to how the Chen Yongzhou case has been handled and what its legal basis really is.
Critics have also criticized the way Chen was paraded on CCTV. This, they say, is essentially “trial by media,” something we’ve seen on a number of so-called “legal programs” lately.
Actually, I don’t quite agree with the characterization of this as “trial by media.” Why? Because this term generally applies when we’re talking about independent media that make their own editorial judgements that impact the outcome of trials. In the case of CCTV, however, we are dealing instead with an official media outlet serving as a tool of power, for which reporting is, we should say, a “compulsory exercise.”
But the apparent revelations in the second phase of the Chen Yongzhou case — a television “confession” and rumors of high-level support from officials in Beijing — put many people in a tight spot. So this journalist we so vocally supported is in fact corrupt?
The All-China Journalists Association (ACJA), which at first showed rare solidarity with the reporter, quickly changed its tune, issuing a condemnation of the reporter’s conduct. The New Express could only capitulate and proclaim its guilt, its management suffering the consequences.
So much remains unclear, hidden by the smog. But we can say for certain that the credibility of China’s news media has plunged to a new low with this case. Media consumers must now think to themselves: if money is at work behind everything we read, where is the information we can trust?
[2]
When we look back to ten years ago, it’s incredible to think what relative prestige media had at that time. Around the time of the Sun Zhigang incident and the SARS epidemic, media were seen to be doing important work, both state-run media and commercially driven media. There was a sense that it was a golden age of investigative reporting.
It was also clear at that time that the government supported watchdog journalism, or what in Chinese is called “supervision by public opinion” (舆论监督). During Journalist’s Day in 2003, CCTV’s Accounts (讲述) program did a special segment in which it introduced a number of top journalists at the time, including Chai Jing (柴静), Qu Zhangying (曲长缨) and Ji Huiyan (冀惠彦) of CCTV, Zhu Yu (朱玉) of Xinhua News Agency, and such well-known investigative reporters as Wang Keqin (王克勤), Jiang Xue (江雪), Chen Feng (陈峰) and Zhao Shilong (赵世龙).
I recall that program with gratitude. Under the direction of anchor Zhang Xiaoqin (张小琴), who is now a teacher at Tsinghua University’s School of Journalism and Communications, these journalists shared wonderful stories about their work on a high-quality, professional program. It stimulated the excitement of a whole generation of aspiring journalists in China.
At the same time I really worry that that program might have been the pinnacle.
What many Chinese probably don’t know, in fact, is that a study done in the United States in 2003 showed already that Chinese journalism had its darker side. The disinterested results of that study indicated that among 66 countries where pay-for-play news was prevalent, the situation in China was the most severe.
The same year, I wrote a piece called, “Two Feudalisms in the Media We Must Be Mindful Of” (警惕传媒的双重“封建化”), in which I drew on the ideas of the German sociologist Jürgen Habermas and urged greater attention to the dangers of political and commercial manipulation of the media.
That piece, now a decade old, is as relevant today as ever.
These days, some of the journalists featured in the Accounts segment have retired. Others have left the profession. A few continue to hold on against the odds. The glories of those days have faded, and the rot we have seen spread through government and through business is now infecting the media as well.
The situation is more serious now than it ever has been. I don’t have reliable numbers available, but I would suggest that journalists who accept red envelopes as a matter of course now outnumber those who refuse.
[3]
In a piece called, “Rent Seeking in the Media is Unforgivable” (新闻寻租不可恕), Caixin editor-in-chief Hu Shuli (胡舒立) recently wrote about the chaos prevailing in China’s media. Hu’s piece drew a strong reaction from many journalists — a rare tide of dissenting opinion for a popular editor whose views are generally praised.
One of the chief objections to Hu’s piece was that by criticizing corruption in the media before the full facts of the Chen Yongzhou case have come to light — particularly given problems in how the case has been handled — Hu Shuli risked inviting further constraints on the already limited space enjoyed by journalists in China.
In fact, the two sides are on the same page. While it’s certainly true that we can’t glimpse the facts in the Chen Yongzhou case clearly as it stands right now, those journalists finding fault with Hu Shuli’s points must appreciate just how horrifying the situation really is in the media right now with respect to corruption.
As I was writing this piece, a number of people genuinely concerned about the future of journalism in China were busy canvassing opinions and exploring the possibility that news media might themselves prohibit such practices as pay-for-play and news extortion.
This should have happened long ago. But I have doubts about the effectiveness of this approach. First of all, checking abuses in the media cannot depend on moral restraint alone, just as the war on corruption has to be supported by legal mechanisms that at present don’t exist.
Secondly, there is the question of the relationship of media to power. Those media that are closer to power enjoy greater status. Some people have rightly pointed out that Chen Yongzhou’s newspaper, the New Express, is just a small-time player in the larger scheme of things. There are much more powerful “ghosts” of misconduct — and they are hiding inside the bigger media players [such as state-run media].
Third, rights and obligations must be balanced. If all we do is prohibit media from rent seeking, and we don’t ensure that their basic right to perform a monitoring role is protected by the law, then this type of supervision [including investigative reporting] can only weaken as a result. And right now, it’s position is already weak. If we say media supervision was in a position of strength ten years ago, we certainly cannot same the same today.
Fourth, right now new media are becoming more and more influential while traditional media are increasingly under financial strain. So if these problems, like accepting red envelopes and doing soft coverage, were a problem before, they will become even more so now. There are no exit mechanisms for news media, and we’ll certainly see some of them sacrificing their discretion on their way out.
Is it possible that news corruption is now lingering haze that we cannot dispel? In any case, it seems that this year we have little choice but to spend Journalist’s Day in a smoggy gloom.
 

As all eyes turn to the mysterious jeep that burst into flames this week near the Tiananmen Gate, the fate of New Express journalist Chen Yongzhou (陈永洲) is bound to fade into the background. But we must remember not to forget Chen’s story. It has, very possibly, all the makings of a cliff-hanging crime thriller — and we are barely into the first chapter.
As we all know, Chen’s saga began as a relatively simple story: a newspaper making a rare public call for the release of its reporter, who had been detained by police on slander charges for a series of investigative reports.
Just as it seemed the tide might turn against Chen Yongzhou’s accuser, Hong Kong and Shenzhen-listed Zoomlion, and against Changsha police, the state-run China Central Television ran an on-camera “confession” in which Chen said he had accepted money to run a series of false reports on Zoomlion. The day after the “confession” aired, Chen’s newspaper, the New Express, published a front-page apology, saying it had not adequately reviewed his reports.

The story line suddenly changed. This was no longer about a courageous and desperate campaign by a newspaper to protect its own. It was about a journalist who had maliciously attacked a company for personal gain, and who in the process had smeared the reputation of his newspaper and his profession.
The All-China Journalists Association (ACJA), an official organization ostensibly representing the interests of media personnel in China — and which initially pledged to look into Chen’s detention — immediately flip-flopped, condemning the reporter’s confessed actions.
There were no new facts in the case, mind you. For its part, the ACJA seemed to drop its promised investigation; it was enough that the reporter had confessed on TV:

The All-China Journalists Association (ACJA) Saturday condemned a Chinese reporter who has been detained on suspicion of releasing unverified and untrue stories about a company.
Chen Yongzhou, a journalist with the New Express based in the southern city of Guangzhou, confessed to police that he had released a series of unverified and false reports about the engineering giant Zoomlion at the request of others.
Chen’s behavior has seriously violated journalistic professional ethics and harmed the media’s credibility, said the ACJA in a statement, adding that the New Express should also be held responsible for dereliction of duty over the past year.

That is a marvelous opening paragraph from Xinhua News Agency. It tells us, in twenty-four words, everything we need to know about the Chen Yongzhou case. Notice, the reporter has been “detained on suspicion of releasing unverified and untrue stories about a company,” but the ACJA, nominally charged with protecting him, has already “condemned” him.
There we have it. Chen Yongzhou is guilty until proven so.
There are so many lingering problems and questions in this case. But one of the biggest ones, obviously, is whether Chen’s confession was coerced. It’s a fact that he was marched in for his televised confession between two police officers. He was in handcuffs and wearing a prison jumpsuit. Web users in China also noted what appeared to be (but no one can possibly confirm) an abrasion on his neck just inside his collar. Can anyone with half a brain for law and reason take this confession to mean anything at all?
Here is what Wei Yongzheng, China’s most prominent media law expert, said in an article today:

This program of China Central Television’s, allowing a detained suspect to face the television camera and confess before the whole country . . . directly violates Criminal Procedure Law, which states that “no person may be forced to confess their own crimes.” When someone has been deprived of their personal freedom, and when they are escorted out in prison garb and in handcuffs by a pair of brawny police officers — to say that they are consciously and willingly confessing their wrongs in their own words wouldn’t fool even a three year-old child.

Legally speaking, then, this confession means nothing in terms of Chen Yongzhou’s guilt or innocence. But it speaks volumes about the conduct of Changsha police and China Central Television.
Here again is Wei Yongzheng:

The China Central Television program exposes the illegal behavior of the police. The Prison Statute clearly stipulates: “Restraints may be used, with the approval of the prison warden, in cases where there is reason to believe an offender might use violence, resist, escape or attempt suicide. In emergency situations, such equipment may be used initially, and then report be made to the prison warden. [Such equipment] should be removed outside the above-mentioned conditions.” . . .
The new Criminal Procedure Law introduced last year made additional demands about not forcing confessions, and also made stipulations about protecting the secrecy of information during the process of investigation and trial. Our media must study these important regulations diligently, making fundamental changes to the method of reporting confessions by suspects before trial. This report from CCTV not only failed to make these adjustments, but was even more flagrant than usual in its violations. This is perplexing and disappointing.

The upshot here is that the broadcast “confession” by CCTV’s Morning News program should be understood not as evidence of Chen Yongzhou’s guilt, but as a bleak illustration of how his rights have been violated by both police and the media.
The deeper irony is that while the CCTV “confession” propelled the Chen Yongzhou story away from the narrative of the victimized journalist and established the idea of the journalist as a breaker of laws and ethics, the only demonstrably unethical and possibly unlawful media conduct in this case is that of CCTV.
Other media, including the New Express, and agencies and organizations like the ACJA, have seized on the televised “confession.” They have reported it, and acted on it, with the assumption that it is the disinterested truth. In doing so, they have gone against their legal and professional duties, says Wei Yongzheng:

I must express my condemnation in seeing the statements of the All-China Journalists Association and other agencies, which simply repeated the confession of the reporter in this case. And I will not jump on the bandwagon in judging that the reporter is guilty. This [restraint] accords with the law. I hope that the police in this case and the media, in accord with the law, will immediately stop propagating the idea that the suspect is guilty. And I hope the case can be sent quickly to the procuratorate for investigation. If indeed a crime has been committed, then an impartial verdict must be rendered by the court in strict accordance with the Criminal Procedure Law. Only then can the truth be revealed and all doubts be eliminated.

Indeed, given what a steaming dog mess this whole case has become, how can we possibly know who is telling the truth? It is a well-established fact that state media in China have been among the worst offenders in cases of journalistic misconduct, including the acceptance of bribes and gag fees.
We can easily imagine the following totally hypothetical scenario: a listed company, stung by a series of reports from a commercial newspaper, pushes local authorities to arrest the reporter responsible; shamed again by a very public call for the reporter’s release, the company (and local authorities) seek out a program on state-run television, which agrees to air a forced confession by the reporter in exchange for a generous advertising purchase; the televised confession is a public relations coup for the listed company, turning the news narrative around and pushing its stock price higher.
The role of the ACJA in the Chen Yongzhou case is particularly shameful. Consider what the association says in its formal response to the CCTV “confession”:

The association safeguards reporters’ legal rights and interests, but also strongly opposes all unethical practices, including the abuse of rights in news gathering, and publishing false stories in exchange for cash.

CCTV’s decision to air the Chen Yongzhou “confession” was quite clearly an “abuse of rights in news gathering.” And that abuse directly concerns the “legal rights and interests” of the journalist at the center of this story.
On both accounts, the All-China Journalists Association has failed itself and China’s professional journalists.

Guangzhou’s New Express, which made international headlines yesterday with a brassy front-page editorial calling for the release of one of its reporters from Changsha police custody, has repeated the call on its front page today.
In a bold headline in blue brackets toward the bottom of today’s front page, the New Express says of reporter Chen Yongzhou: AGAIN WE ASK FOR HIS RELEASE. A smaller headline reads: “Everything must be resolved within the framework of the law. You cannot detain first and [rationalize] charges later.” A jump directs readers to page A05, where there is a lengthy story summarizing the Chen Yongzhou case — drawing on reporting from other media, including the official Xinhua News Agency and The Beijing News.
More details on the circumstances of Chen Yongzhou’s detention have also emerged.
Chen Yongzhou’s wife told a reporter from The Beijing News that on the morning of October 17, Chen Yongzhou received a telephone call from Guangzhou police saying that there were new development’s in a report of theft the family had filed months earlier. Chen’s wife accompanied him to the police station, she said, because she was most familiar with the situation. When they arrived at the station they were taken into an interview room. Four or five officers then came in and identified themselves as Changsha police, saying Chen Yongzhou would be placed under criminal detention effective immediately.

So far, plenty of other Chinese media have followed suit with this story. We are hearing that a strongly worded editorial from Guangzhou’s Southern Metropolis Daily was removed by propaganda authorities. The headline of that editorial apparently was: “Cross-Regional Detention Sends Chill Through Media; The Abuse of Police Powers Does Not Stand Before the Law.”