Foreign Media Attacked In China Flood Zone

Severe flooding in China this month. Journalists covering
the disaster have been attacked by people after the communist
government whipped up nationalistic fervor. 

Well, this is alarming.

Western journalists sent to and near Zhengzhou, China to report on extreme flooding there have been attacked and harassed by locals, almost surely egged on by the authoritarian and nationalistic Chinese government. 

The Guardian reports:

"As recovery and rescue efforts continue in Henan province after last week's deadly floods, groups including Reporters Without Borders and the Foreign Correspondents Club of China have condemned recent harassment and threats toward journalists covering the disaster."

Reporters from the BBC, Los Angeles Times, Deutsche Welle, Al Jazeera, CNN, Agence France-Presse and the Associated Press, among others, have been harassed.

Local Chinese employees of foreign news outlets have also been harassed and doxed.  

The Foreign Correspondents Club of China released a Twitter thread Tuesday detailing examples of the abuse. 

A crew with the Associated Press was stopped and reported to police for filming in a public area. Reporters with Agence France Presse were forced to delete footage by hostile residents. 

Local employees of the news agencies received death threats, the Foreign Correspondents Club of China said. 

Meanwhile, the BBC said the Chinese Communist Party put up social media posts asking citizens to post the whereabouts of BBC  crews covering the flood. Public comments posted to the Communist Party message included death threats against journalists. 

Chinese government minions are doing this because, as usual, there's a truth to power thing going on. Reporters are documenting a lack of preparedness, relief shortfalls and post-disaster relief missteps in China, and the Powers That Be don't like that. 

So, the Chinese Communist Party resorts to whipping up nationalistic sentiment to discourage journalists. The citizens become pawns and do the dirty work of the Communist Party. 

It is always difficult for residents of a disaster zone to deal with the media.  People generally want to tell their stories and journalists are always willing to oblige, But the heavy presence of the media sometimes feels like the rest of the debris: They're in the way and have to be moved. 

This dynamic is usually manageable, but not always in China and other authoritarian regimes. Worse, even many western democracies are becoming more authoritarian and encouraging harassment of journalists. 

This happens even in the United States. You see how the Trump cult often attacks journalists who don't stick to the cult's whackadoodle idea of "reality." Trump kept calling reporters "enemies of the people," after all. Jeesh! 

As climate change accelerates, so too will big weather disasters.  Big disasters tend to both increase political stability and in large segments of the population, increase the appeal of authoritarian governments. 

We talk about feedback loops in climate change.  An example: Arctic ice melts, exposing darker water. Darker water absorbs more of the sun's heat than ice, so the warmth in the Arctic accelerates, melting more ice and on and on. 

What we're seeing in China is perhaps a political dimension of a climate change feedback loop, or at least an example of what we could see more of.

Climate change creates or worsen a disaster.  Governments then try to muzzle the press to hide their own missteps, to deflect the spotlight away from their own disaster or climate change policies. That prevents needed information from getting out, and erodes democracy.  It becomes the new normal, and it feeds on itself, and spreads. 

News organizations and others should really keep up the pressure on China and anyone else who interferes with the media gathering information on disasters, or anything else for that matter.

I would like to see the Biden administration call out China on this as well. 

We can't ignore these abuses.