Dark Journalism

Censorship isn’t the only thing wrong with Chinese reporting. The other one is corruption” Gady A. Epstein reports in the Forbes:

Zhou Jianguo and a colleague, flying the flag of a Chinese daily newspaper, drove for hours into the mountains to get to a mine accident that killed two during the May 31 weekend in Jingle County in the coal-rich heartland of Shanxi Province, southwest of Beijing. It had taken enterprising journalism to get to this story. At the end of a long day they were set to march up the stairs of a dilapidated concrete government building to confront a county work-safety official about the accident.

But that’s where the reporting stopped. No story about the accident ever appeared in the paper, the Shanxi Legal Daily, or in any other news outlet. The newspaper denies employing anyone named Zhou Jianguo. Zhou and his colleague refused to allow a FORBES reporter to observe the encounter with the work-safety official. When their ten-minute meeting was over, the two men and the official, a man addressed as Director Li, declined to say what they had discussed.

What happened in that brief encounter that could make a fatal mine accident magically disappear? “Black journalism,” according to our guide on the scene, a man known only as Old Zhao, a self-described businessman and journalist who arranged our meeting with the pair of reporters. Before going up to Director Li’s office, the two younger men had huddled with Old Zhao, who then bluntly explained the reason FORBES couldn’t go into the meeting. With a foreigner present, “it would be impossible for Li to pay them.”

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