Press Reciprocity with China

There was a good piece in the Wall Street Journal before Christmas that told an interesting, and well documented, story about how China controls the press in China but the US does not control theirs.  We know it, of course, but this story is well told.  Foreign journalists are harassed, manipulated, restricted, and boxed in over the most trivial of subjects, while the US allows Chinese journalists to operate almost as if they were US journalists.  The point was there is no reciprocity with treatment of journalists by China. 

China is not exactly a beat I would want.  They only want good news coming out and they will take all accounts into their country.  They use elaborate technical means to harass media outlets, filter their results in search engines, sabotage the content of websites, misdirect readers to other servers.  This is the Great Cannon turned loose on the press of the world.  But the one thing this article has missed is the ability and willingness of China to influence the content of media that is not directed at China. 

The Chinese are influencing press reports, media stories, and independent publications that are contrary to their own opinions.  That is what concerned me about Google's foray into the browser filtering business in China.  They are not content to limit access to their own country's citizens;  they want to limit access to the world.  That was their first disagreement with Google, when the Chinese wanted Google to limit access to everyone, not just Chinese citizens.  That was the old Google and the results were predictable.  We might wonder how that same argument might turn out today. 

We get a lot of news via social media.  Outside of China, there is not much filtering of news.  But inside China there is one additional step that helps their censorship - China stole the social media platforms and used that software to filter content.  The engine becomes the vehicle for censorship, much like the project Google said it was working on for China.  So, we can pretend that it is just an issue of reciprocity for the press, but there is much more to it than that.  Even with the same treatment of journalists, China would still be far ahead in the dissemination of news because they control the medium.