Local Party chief jailed for paying off reporters

• Source: Global Times
• [10:03 December 14 2009]
• Comments

Earlier this month, four journalists and a self-proclaimed reporter received jail terms ranging from nine months to one year for taking bribes from a coalmine owner in Shanxi Province to cover up a fatal accident.

In 2005, the Ruzhou city government of Henan Province paid 200,000 yuan ($294,000) to 450 journalists or imposter reporters not to cover a mine accident. In 2002, 11 journalists were exposed to have received bribes from mine owners and local officials after an accident, four of them from the Xinhua News Agency.

A print journalist in northeastern Jilin, who claimed to have covered mine accidents several times, told the Global Times, "most of the obstruction I met when reporting such incidents were from local governments."

"Most of our reports were made part-secretly. The most we wanted to dodge was local publicity departments," he said. "When accidents happened, local officials, who are afraid of a bad influence on their performance, would come forward, and miners, who are eager to cover the truth, would open their wallets."

The reporter cited the experience of he and his colleagues being blocked from full access to facts when investigating an accident at a State-owned mine in Qitaihe city, Helongjiang Province, in November 2007. The official death toll was 171.

The reporter said the number of victims was not clear and their bodies were still in the shaft when the first batch of reporters got there. In the afternoon, he received a call from a local publicity department, which invited him and other reporters from various media to a dinner that evening.

He felt that might be a tactic to lure the reporters away, as the designated restaurant was several miles away from the mine.

"One of our colleagues was dispatched to deal with the officials, while myself and another stayed in a car near the shaft in the darkness," he recalled.

As he expected, the bodies of victims were lifted out of the shaft at around 10 pm and rushed to a funeral home in a nearby county.

In other cases, he said he found the families of the deceased workers were paid to remain silent when meeting reporters.

Kang Juan and Zhang Han contributed to this story