Journalist Group Criticizes Press Freedoms Under Hu Jintao

By Joseph Kahn | The New York Times
03 February 2007

BEIJING, Feb. 2 — A leading media watchdog group on Friday accused President Hu Jintao of China of seeking to bring the media to heel and instigating an expanding crackdown on the press despite China’s pledge to enhance media freedoms before the 2008 Olympics, which are to be held in Beijing.

Reporters Without Borders, based in Paris, said in its annual report on press freedoms that conditions for the news media and for journalists had deteriorated in China.

“The press is being forced into self-censorship, the Internet is filtered, and the foreign media very closely watched,” the group said in the report, which was released Friday.

It continued, “Faced with burgeoning social unrest and journalists who are becoming much less compliant, the authorities, directed by President Hu Jintao, have been bringing the media to heel in the name of a ‘harmonious society.’ ”

The group cited the five-year sentence given to a Hong Kong reporter, Ching Cheong, and a three-year sentence for Zhao Yan, a researcher in the Beijing bureau of The New York Times, among other efforts to intimidate journalists.

“In both cases they were convicted after shoddy trials with no defense witnesses,” the group said.

In total, the group estimated that 31 journalists were serving jail terms in China and that the authorities had convicted 52 more people for posting political views on the Internet.

Other reporters have faced physical attacks by hired thugs associated with the local authorities or powerful business interests, and the police often fail to investigate the assaults, the group said.