Skip to footer

Censored in Beijing: a correspondent watches himself fade to black

The Monitor's Peter Ford knows censorship happens all the time on his China beat. But when it happened to him in an interview with CNN, he felt punched in the gut.

|
CNN
The Monitor's Peter Ford on CNN, just moments before the program he was appearing on – about China's censorship – was itself censored.

| Beijing

It’s not as if I’ve been physically assaulted, I grant you. But I certainly feel violated – that nauseous sensation when you realize your home has been burgled.

I’ve been censored.

One moment I was on the TV screen, a guest of CNN’s “On China” talk show discussing press freedom in China, and the next I wasn’t. The screen went black. The Chinese censors had pulled the plug. Where there was light, they brought darkness. Nobody in mainland China could watch the program.

“Well of course,” you will say. “You are in China. What do you expect? The freedom to talk publicly about the lack of freedom?”

And, of course, I know perfectly well that almost all of my Chinese colleagues are censored, or forced to self-censor, every day.

But this was my first time. And the first time is different.

As well as my day job being The Christian Science Monitor’s correspondent in China, I am also president of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China. That means people come to me when they want to know about foreign correspondents’ working conditions in China.

Those conditions have been getting worse in recent years. The Chinese government has even been denying journalist visas to reporters from newspapers it particularly dislikes, such as The New York Times.

So when CNN’s Kristie Lu Stout invited me onto her monthly talk show, along with another Beijing-based foreign correspondent and a Hong Kong journalism professor, I had plenty to say.

We taped the show in Hong Kong last month. But when it went out on Wednesday night, I had answered only one question by the time – four minutes into the conversation – the screen suddenly went black.

What did the Chinese censors think they were doing (aside from providing more grist to critics’ mills)? CNN is not generally available to Chinese homes; you have to have a satellite dish that only luxury hotels and special residential compounds for foreigners are allowed to install.

By killing the transmission, the authorities denied only a tiny, overwhelmingly foreign audience the chance to see the show. And it was hardly the stuff of which revolutions are made – three middle-aged intellectuals discussing the mechanics of censorship.

But even that, it seems, unnerves the Chinese government so badly that it did not dare let any of its citizens watch us. The censors had to stamp us out.

When I think about it, that is what made me feel sick: the authorities’ blunt declaration, with the flick of a switch, that I did not exist. It is an unsettling sensation.

But I do exist, and so do my colleagues. And here is a link to the discussion that the Chinese government does not want you to hear.

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/02/18/world/asia/on-china-journalism-transcript/index.html

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Censored in Beijing: a correspondent watches himself fade to black
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-Pacific/2014/0220/Censored-in-Beijing-a-correspondent-watches-himself-fade-to-black
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe