From Financial Times:
HSBC and the China Charity Foundation celebrated a decade of working together last month, bringing in the global bank’s chairman and renting a room in the Great Hall of the People . Organisers of the event extended the charity to Chinese reporters: donating Rmb200 ($26.40, ‚Ǩ19.30, ¬£13) to each of those who attended, according to people present.
Such payments – called “transport money” by public relations firms – are a ubiquitous feature of media events in China, but one critics say skews coverage in an increasingly competitive Chinese news market. “It’s awful. It’s an embarrassment for Chinese journalism‚Äâ.‚Äâ.‚Äâ. and it’s corruption,” says Ying Chan, director of the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong . “It’s not that journalists endorse this – people live with it knowing it is wrong.” [Full Text]
