From the EastSouthWestNorth blog (link):
Since broadcasting first on May 17, 1996, CCTV‘s program “News Investigation” has gone through ten years. The 459 episodes, together with the programs that were given orange stickers and locked away in a cabinet because they could not be broadcast, form a historical record of a television’s non-stop pursuit of the truth.
In producer Zhang Jie’s view, bringing out good progams always puts pressure on the producers. The pressure may come cause a good investigative report (especially one about public opinion oversight) to be shelved forever. Zhang Jie calls this a constant pressure because the public relations efforts of the investigative subjects “are responses that are like human instincts. Your program is touching the interests of certain people. You are affecting his reputation, his wealth, his official job and you may even cost him his life.”
A broadly circulated saying is that there is usually two long lines in front of the offices of the Focus Interview program: one of them is for the petitioners who travel from all over to country to tell their stories to the Focus Interview program and the other one is for the cadres who travel from all over the county and stay at hotels to ask Focus Interview not to broadcast anything critical about them.
See also CDT’s “CCTV Anchorwoman: Program On Corrupt Mayor Censored” (link)
