China May Fine News Media to Limit Coverage
By JOSEPH KAHN, June 27
BEIJING, June 26 — Chinese media outlets will be fined if they report on "sudden events" without prior authorization from government officials, under a draft law being considered by the Communist Party-controlled legislature.
The law would give government officials a powerful new tool to restrict coverage of mass outbreaks of disease, riots, strikes, accidents and other events....
is, of course horrifying to any free speech absolutist, which I consider myself to be (and that very much includes hate speech.) BUT....
to be totally honest about my thoughts upon reading it, I must admit, embarassed, that I can dredge up some sympathy with their desire to have this power.
In several years of internet news junkiedom, I've seen so many examples of things like damaging rumors, not to mention unfounded panic, coming from "the masses" having access to "breaking," and then carrying the "breaking" off into a totally different direction of total disinformation, not following up with the details/corrections/revisions to the "breaking." Used to be that only a select group of editors and the like had access to "the wires," there was a filter making judgements about whether a story was ready to "publish" or whether it needed to be offered with a cavaet.
Yes, my concerns are elitist. But isn't the basic idea of things like a public health service with power elitist/totalitarian?
The whole "democratic" approach to news has worked out well so far, no major Orson Welles "War of the Worlds" type scenarios (though some Bird Flu forums might come close to fitting the bill, not to mention the way many Americans first ended up supporting the idea of the Iraq war) but it certainly is a less efficient way of getting accuracy on a story. The same thing happened with many of the mysteries of the stock market being opened to "all," first much much more volatility subject to rumor, but after time, a tempering of that effect.
Big pre-emptive: Of course I do not think most governments are any good at doing anything like this. Not the least of which because they have been proven by history to make very stupid decisions about when it would good to squelch herd or mob reactions, often even counter-productive to their own cause. There's an example cited in the article; they haven't learned any lessons:
...The declassification came after authorities initially covered up the SARS epidemic in 2003. Health authorities later acknowledged that the cover-up made the SARS outbreak more severe.
The proposed new law would appear to undercut the spirit of that revision, forcing reporters and editors to seek prior approval before writing about disease outbreaks....
And yes, I do believe that sunshine and fresh air are the best disinfectant....the only problem is that "breaking" news is not always the equivalent of "sunshine and fresh air." I am actually relieved to see less popularity for that kind of thing on both the net and on cable TV of late, and a preference for more developed stories.
