COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW – 18/03/2020
Jon Allsop
IN MID-FEBRUARY, the State Department designated five Chinese state news outlets operating in the US—Xinhua, CGTN, China Radio, China Daily, and the People’s Daily—as missions of a foreign government. The move, officials said, wouldn’t entail restrictions on the outlets’ journalism, but would require them to report personnel and other details to the US government. The following day, China expelled three reporters from the Wall Street Journal—a step that the paper called unprecedented in the post-Mao era. Ostensibly, China was punishing the Journal for a headline, in its opinion section, dubbing the country “the real sick man of Asia.” Many observers—including dozens of staffers at the Journal—agreed that the headline was offensive, but as Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, wrote afterward for CJR, the timing of the expulsions, so soon after the State Department designation, seemed “like more than a coincidence.” Simon criticized the Trump administration’s decision; as a result, he warned, more American journalists in China risked facing restrictions which, among other things, would hinder valuable ongoing reporting on the coronavirus, which originated in the country. US officials didn’t heed his words. In early March, they capped the number of Chinese citizens allowed to work at the same state-run outlets in the US. Roughly 60 of their staffers were affected by the order. The State Department denied that it was expelling journalists, but in effect, it was.