Michael Forsythe, once a reporter at Bloomberg News and now at The Times – covering China for each — packed a lot into 140 characters Thursday morning when he tweeted:
He was referring to a Times editorial that took a tough stance on the Chinese government’s efforts to control the foreign press. It followed public statements earlier this week by the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, who appeared to be warning foreign news organizations that they ought to ease up on negative news coverage if they want to stay in the country.
The editorial said, in part: “The Times has no intention of altering its coverage to meet the demands of any government – be it that of China, the United States, or any other nation. Nor would any credible news organization.”
I asked the editorial page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, how the editorial came about, especially given the potential effects on The Times. The paper has had trouble getting its journalists’ visas renewed, and has had its potentially lucrative Chinese-language website blocked.
He said Thursday that it was “pretty simple,” resulting from a conversation with The Times’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger.
“Arthur and I had a conversation about it yesterday and it seemed the right thing to do,” Mr. Rosenthal said. “Xi’s comments were so dismissive and so emblematic of the way governments like China’s work that they demanded a response. Changing our coverage to suit any government’s demands is not an option for us.”
A reader, Ken Dargenson, wrote to me Thursday to say he saw evidence of an improper blending of news and opinion interests in the editorial. “Has something changed at the Times, such that now the board does decree what news coverage will and will not be?” he wrote.
Mr. Rosenthal told me that nothing had changed in that regard; the board doesn’t control news-gathering policy. The editorial “was not a decree, just a statement of what we knew to be true,” he said. “I gave Dean Baquet a heads up about the China editorial, since it was commenting on the news report. That was appropriate. He had no input into the actual editorial.” (In addition, it’s worth noting that the news, opinion and business sides of The Times all report directly to Mr. Sulzberger.)
Separately, Joseph Kahn, The Times’s ranking editor for international news, told Erik Wemple of The Washington Post on Thursday that Times journalists are “a little bit hostages” in China, in the sense that they don’t want to leave their posts for fear that colleagues taking their place won’t be able to work in the country. A number of Times journalists, including the columnist Nicholas Kristof, have been unable to obtain visas.
Mr. Wemple characterized The Times’s reporting in China as hard-edged, with coverage of “the super-rich and an exposé of the regime’s effectiveness in censoring Bloomberg.” A Times investigation in 2012 by David Barboza won a Pulitzer Prize for its revelations about the wealth of the family of Wen Jiabao, who was the prime minister at that time. The Times has also reported on Bloomberg News’s apparent efforts to appease the Chinese in order to keep doing business there; Bloomberg’s website was also blocked after its aggressive China coverage in 2012.
On Twitter, some raised another objection – that The Times hasn’t always pushed back against its own government. Nathan Fuller wrote:
The Times hasn’t been flawless in that regard, it’s true; and I’ve written about that here. But this affirmation of the courage it showed in publishing the Pentagon Papers – and more recently with its publication of the information released through Edward Snowden – is welcome.
The Times editorial writer Brent Staples got at that in his tweet Wednesday morning, providing a link to the editorial, using the inspiring words of Adolph Ochs about how he wanted his paper to cover the news.
The situation between The Times and China is far from smooth, and this editorial won’t make it any easier. But it was still the right message to send.