China News Clamp on Tianjin

This morning on CNN, who was lucky enough to have a reporter in Tianjin during the explosion of a chemical storage facility, we saw how China's press controls are both resource intensive and restrictive.  The reporter reminded his audience that all of them had been reminded that "there would be severe penalties for spreading rumors" a phrase that means a good bit more over there than here.  One guy who "spred rumors" about the number of people killed in riots in Xinjiang went to prison for a a number of years, having gone around the Great Firewall to do his reporting.  A reporter on a cell phone can't do that quite as easily, though it must have made his handlers very nervous.

We got to see some of the secret police in their street clothes in his video.  They were policing some victims' families who wanted more information than they were getting on the condition of their relatives.  They crowded around the poor guy's cell phone looking for the footage he had from the hospital, understandable by any standard, but the police also crowded around his cell phone looking at the same coverage.  He had some pretty good shots of people being wheeled into the hospital for treatment.  He had even better shots of the destruction  and physical damage to property,  one mile from the fire.  You can bet we won't be seeing too many more of those in the coming days.  The Chinese lay down rules about what type of reporting can be done, and what those reports should say.

The cell phone has taken a good bit of their control away for catastrophic events like this fire.  They can shut off the transmission of things, but the camera still stores it and it does get out.  The most graphic images of the explosions and fire will not be contained by any amount of control.  They were scary and made by people who lived close enough to get burned in the process.  Watch how these images are slowly replaced over the next few days, by people being released from the hospitals, families moving back home after being removed from the city, débris being picked up from everywhere, and police making the area safe again.

Fox News reported the following today:  " As is customary during disasters, Chinese authorities tried to keep a tight control over information. Police kept journalists and bystanders away with a cordon a few miles from the site. On China's popular microblogging platform of Weibo, some users complained that their posts about the blasts were deleted, and the number of searchable posts on the disaster fluctuated, in a sign that authorities were manipulating or placing limits on the number of posts."