Censorship – eastern and western style
Jinfo Blog

18th October 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

Item

As if doing business in China weren’t challenging enough, we also have to contend with official attempts to interfere in reporting of business news. We order these things better in the West – or do we? Let’s take China first. Just as the FT was unveiling its revamped FTChinese web site, complete with a new interactive Community and Forum network (http://digbig.com/5bakwt), the Economist was reporting the travails of the Beijing based Caijing magazine, one of few in China to take a robustly independent line despite the regular threat of censorship. Facing an advertising revenue slump just like other publications throughout the world, staff are concerned about threats to the magazine’s editorial independence. ‘Most Chinese journalists are far less scrupulous,’ the Economist reports, adding that ‘many take bribes from companies to publish flattering stories’ (http://digbig.com/5bakww). Add to this issue concerns about the reliability of Chinese economic and business data generally (try http://www.vivavip.com/go/e15679 or http://www.vivavip.com/go/e6363 for instance) and information managers face continuing challenges in ensuring that what they deliver is not only accurate but also complete. If local media and statistical sources can’t be trusted, where do they turn? Perhaps to the Twitterers and leakers. For it was they who blew the lid off the so-called super injunction imposed on the London based Guardian newspaper by the law firm Carter Ruck. Served on behalf of the oil trading firm Trafigura, the injunction prevented publication not only of details of the Minton report into the health effects of dumping toxic waste on the Ivory Coast, but also of the existence of the injunction itself. Then when Paul Farrelly MP put down a Parliamentary question revealing it, Carter Ruck prevented the Guardian from reporting that as well (http://digbig.com/5bakwx). The Guardian’s disclosure that it had been barred from reporting proceedings in Parliament caused widespread outrage. Correctly identifying the Parliamentary question, bloggers and Twitterers gave it such widely distributed coverage that within 12 hours it effectively became impracticable to suppress it further, leading litigation specialist John Mackenzie of Pinsent Masons to suggest that injunctions could lose their power if enough of a groundswell of public opinion built up against them (http://digbig.com/5bakwy). However, in a bad tempered editorial Wikileaks – foremost online whistleblower since its launch in spring 2007 (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e3) – lambasted the ‘self-congratulating hyperbole’ surrounding Twitter’s role in the affair. Wikileaks had already published a number of relevant documents, including the original super injunction against the Guardian (http://digbig.com/5bakxa), and it rightly said that the affair was not yet over (http://digbig.com/5bakxb). For information managers struggling to keep their clients reliably informed from a proliferating range of sources, both verified and unverified, a turf war between Wikileaks and the wider social networking community would be less than helpful.

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