While the Beijing Olympics were expected to usher in a period of greater media freedom in China, as the final countdown for the Games nears, the vise on the media is getting tighter. That’s the conclusion of a report released on July 7 by Human Rights Watch, entitled “China’s Forbidden Zones, Shutting the Media out of Tibet and Other ‘Sensitive’ Stories.”

Speaking at the release of the report at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong, Sophie Richardson, the group’s advocacy director for Asia, said the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee is “trying to extort favorable coverage in exchange for accreditation to cover the Games.”

She plus faulted the worldly Olympic Committee and Olympic sponsors, including Coca-Cola, Lenovo, and Samsung, for failing to press Beijing more on human rights. “They all have very nice-sounding lofty corporate social responsibility pledges, but when you challenge them on their involvement in the Games, their aims narrow dramatically,” she says. “Their promises only

apply to humans who work for those companies. They have made no attempt to rock boats.”

Promises, Promises

China won its bid to host the Olympics in part thanks to its promises to improve media freedom, Richardson says, and Beijing did lift temporarily restrictions on the foreign media for the period from January 2007 to October 2008. that liberalization allowed members of the foreign media to travel freely anywhere in the country except Tibet without prior approval, and to interview whoever they wanted.

But the pendulum swung back the other way after protests in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa erupted in mid-March that year, and a government-orchestrated campaign to “demonize” the foreign media ensued, Richardson says. All requests by foreign media to cover the unrest in Tibet were summarily rejected.

“The use of the state media for a campaign alleging Western bias became a convenient and almighty political…

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