War on corruption catches journos in crossfire
By Liu Song-shi
HONG KONG - For the first time in its 70-year history, Xinhua News Agency, China's most authoritative official mouthpiece, has released the names of 11 journalists who pocketed hush money to cover up a disaster that killed 38 miners in northern China's Shanxi province last June.
The release of the journalists' names on September 26 is just the tip of an ugly iceberg of corruption in Chinese journalism, where reporters routinely accept bribes to keep scandals and corruption out of the newspapers or sometimes resort to extortion of officials.
In this case, pressured by the public censure against corruption, the agency finally found the guts to expose four of its own staff. A week before, on September 15, the agency first exposed the journalistic malpractice, but kept its own wrongdoers' names confidential. China Youth, an influential opinion leader, later commented: "Weirdly, Xinhua News Agency did not mention their [journalists] names and serving agencies when covering the massive journalistic corruption. What is it trying to hide? By contrast, the American media earlier reprimanded former journalist Jayson Blair from the New York Times for plagiarism and faked stories, setting an example. Now that the press uncovered other involved individuals' names but not the peers, what kind of attitude is this?"
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