China Imposes Blackout on Train Wreck Coverage

By SHARON LaFRANIERE
BEIJING — After days of growing public fury over last month’s high-speed train crash and the government’s reaction, Chinese authorities have enacted a virtual news blackout on the disaster except for positive stories or information officially released by the government.
The sudden order from the Communist Party’s publicity department, handed down late Friday, forced newspaper editors to frantically tear up pages of their Saturday editions, replacing investigative articles and commentaries about the accident that killed 40 people in eastern China with cartoons or unrelated features.
Major Internet portals removed links to news reports or videos related to the crash in Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province, in which 192 people were also injured.
Authorities even postponed the publication of an article prepared by Xinhua, the government’s news agency, according to one editor who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions.
That report focused on the Railway Ministry’s failure to answer a series of questions about the crash.
The government’s decision to muzzle the media followed a remarkable outpouring of online criticism of the government after the July 23 accident.
For many in China, the train wreck has become a symbol of concerns about whether the government is sacrificing people’s lives and safety in pursuit of breakneck development and cloaking its failures in secrecy or propaganda.
Tens of millions of Chinese have posted messages on the Chinese equivalents of Twitter, questioning why the two high-speed trains collided, whether the rescue effort was bungled and why images from the site showed wrecked train cars being buried in pits even before investigators began work.
Outraged by the order to silence themselves, dozens of journalists this weekend joined the online outcry.
The directives of propaganda authorities, they wrote in various postings, were almost impossible to swallow given the many troubling questions that remain.
The government has placed huge importance on construction of high speed rail, mounting the world’s largest public works project.
“Tonight, hundreds of papers are replacing their pages; thousands of reporters are having their stories retracted; tens of thousands of ghosts can not rest in peace; hundreds of millions of truths are being covered up,” one editor wrote Friday.
“This country is being humiliated by numerous evil hands.”
“My story will not go to print today and looks like I will have to write something else,” wrote another journalist.
“I’d rather leave the page blank with one word — ‘speechless.’ ”
One prominent publication, the Beijing-based Economic Observer, ignored the directive, rolling out nine pages of coverage of the accident in its Saturday edition.
The report described the Railway Ministry as a runaway operation; reconstructed the events in Wenzhou from the viewpoint of dozens of survivors; and examined the failure of the official, state-operated media to report the accident when it occurred.
A commentary carried the headline: “We are all passengers in this high-speed train.”
One of the Observer’s journalists said the pages were already printed when the orders came.
But many others paid heed: editors said the 21st Century Business Herald and China Business Journal each tore up eight pages of articles while the Beijing Times jettisoned four pages.
One discarded article, based on the account of the wife of one victim, was titled: “There was no miracle for them.”
The headline was a pointed reference to a case that has been relentlessly trumpeted by officials and the state-run press — the rescue of a toddler 21 hours after the collision, after rescuers had given up all hope and been told to quit.
“There were three calls,” one editor in Beijing said.
“The first came around 9 p.m., ordering us to ‘cool down’ coverage of the Wenzhou accident as much as possible.”
An hour later, the newspaper was instructed “to print only Xinhua’s wire and not to print anything we had gotten ourselves. No comments, no analysis,” the editor said.
A third call at midnight ordered the accident coverage off the front page.
On its Web site, the Hong Kong Journalists Association protested, noting that only Thursday, Premier Wen Jiabao, speaking at a press conference in Wenzhou, had insisted that the “investigation into the accident should be open, transparent and monitored by the public.”
After initially playing down the accident, the state-run news media had grown more assertive in recent days. They were invigorated in part by the so-called netizens who all week staged an end run around the mainstream press with 140-character word updates on china’s Twitter equivalents.
But some may have paid a price: the producer of one news program on CCTV, china’s state owned television network, was reportedly reprimanded after program.
A colleague said rumors the producer was fired were false, but declined to describe the repercussions.
In a segment two days after the accident, the host of that program asked: “If nobody can be safe, do we still want this speed? Can we drink a glass of milk that’s safe? Can we stay in an apartment that will not collapse?”
“China, please slow down,” the host said.
“If you’re too fast, you may leave the souls of your people behind.”