Media Face Olympic Censorship
Olympic officials have admitted the media face censorship of their online coverage of the Beijing Olympics.
The International Olympic Committee claim they allowed China to break their pledge to grant the international media ‘complete freedom to report’ on the Games, binding journalists in the host city this week with restricted internet access.
Senior IOC member Kevan Gosper announced an agreement had been made with the hosts to block more “sensitive sites” because they were unrelated to the Games, despite China’s agreement to freedom of speech in their Olympic bid in 2001.
‘My preoccupation and responsibility is to ensure that the Games competitions are reported openly to the world,’ said Gosper.
‘The regulatory changes we negotiated with BOCOG (Beijing Olympic Games Organising Committee), and which required Chinese legislative changes were to do with reporting on the Games. This didn’t necessarily extend to free access and reporting on everything that related to China.’
However, journalists in Beijing claimed that as well as being unable to access the so-called ‘sensitive sites’ on human rights, Tibet and the Falun Gong, the BBC Chinese site, the New York Times, Radio Free Asia, al-Jazeera and Taiwanese papers were also blocked.
Beijing Organising Committee spokesman Sun Weide was adamant journalists are not restricted by the censorship.
‘Our promise was that journalists would be able to use the internet for their work during the Olympic Games,’ he said.
‘So we have given them sufficient access to do that.’
A guide for journalists working in China on how to overcome firewalls, lock computer files and find safe translators was published on the Internet on Thursday by Reporters without Borders.
The Paris-based organisation also warns reporters that phone calls and emails may be monitored, as Chinese authorities have demanded Beijing hotels to install spyware on all hotel guest communications. This applies to all of the anticipated 15,000 media and international visitors.
