The Thot Plickens
Many years ago I worked for a time in Shanghai. One night I was at a popular expat bar and struck up a conversation with a guy who said he was the editor of one of the city’s English language dailies. I asked him about censorship in China, and inquired as to how much autonomy he had in deciding what to write. He said that if the building across the street burned down he couldn’t write about it without prior permission from the censors.
I was reminded of this anecdote today when reading in the New York Times that the people responsible for the inferno in the building next door to the CCTV tower was, in fact, CCTV itself.
China’s national television network on Tuesday blamed an illegal fireworks display by its employees for igniting a blaze that destroyed a futuristic luxury hotel and theater here.
In a statement posted on its Web site, the network, China Central Television, said the illegal pyrotechnics on Monday, the final night of the Lunar New Year celebrations, were staged too close to the unfinished Mandarin Oriental Hotel, which is part of the network’s headquarters complex. The network apologized for “the severe damage the fire caused to the country’s property.”
Xinhua, the official news agency, reported Tuesday that one firefighter had died from smoke inhalation and that six firefighters and a construction worker had been injured.
The apology was a rare gesture of contrition by the powerful state-owned network.
But wait, it gets better.
Beijing residents who wanted to see the smoking shell of the hotel had a harder time on Tuesday finding images of the fire on the Internet, on television or in the city’s newspapers.
There were no pictures on the front page of The Beijing News. On Tuesday morning, the home page of Xinhua featured a photo from another event: a stampede in South Korea that left four people dead. Throughout the day, CCTV’s brief bulletins about the blaze omitted images of the burning tower. By evening, the newscast skipped the story entirely.
Even before the flames had been put out early Tuesday, pictures of the burning hotel had been removed from most of the main Internet portals serving China. In the afternoon, the story had been largely buried, although by the evening, news of the fire was accessible on the Xinhua and CCTV Web sites.
The network’s unusual public apology and the media’s skittish approach to covering the fire suggested that the authorities were struggling with how to deal with a delicate event in the age of cellphone cameras and YouTube.
A directive sent out by propaganda officials, which found its way to the Internet after it was leaked, made it clear that the authorities were eager to reduce public attention to the blaze, a colossal embarrassment that many people believe augurs poorly for the new year. “No photos, no video clips, no in-depth reports,” read the memo, which instructed all media outlets to use only Xinhua dispatches. “The news should be put on news areas only, and the comments posting areas should be closed.”
So not only did CCTV censor itself over a fire next door, it censored itself over a fire started by ITS OWN EMPLOYEES. Indeed, here’s the website for CCTV 9, their English language station. See how long it takes you to find their apology. There are stories about a government official meeting with a Saudi official, a koala rescued from the fires in Australia, and the upcoming Valentine’s Day.
The fire across the street, which they started, resulting in the deaths of and injuries to firefighters, not to mention ¥4,000,000,000 (about $600,000,000) damage to a brand new luxury hotel? Buried in small text in the middle of the page. To put this in perspective, imagine if employees of the New York Times had started a fire which engulfed the skyscraper next door, then the Times refused to even publish a story about it while every other newspaper in the country ran with it. I mean, look at the aftermath.
This wasn’t a small blaze in a few rooms, they gutted a luxury hotel worth almost three quarters of a billion dollars, and this is their apology in its entirety.
A devastating fire took place in the adjacent building of the new CCTV complex in Beijing last night around 8.30 pm.
Beijing Fire Control Bureau says CCTV staff responsible for the construction of the new TV complex, hired staff to ignite large festive firecrackers outside the building, and caused the fire. The move did not receive approval from related authorities.
The fire has caused severe damage. CCTV sincerely apologizes for the damage that the fire caused, and the inconvenience it has brought to the public.
So far, related details of the fire are still under investigation. And CCTV will do everything it can to cooperate with related departments in the aftermath.
Basically, “Oops, our bad. Dude, that blows.”
It’s the “lack of permission from authorities” aspect which will all but guarantee a number of life imprisonments and a few death sentences for those involved. But, considering the damage caused and the deaths and injuries to the firefighters, I won’t lose any sleep over it.
