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Coverage
Beijing, Oct. 25, 2017 (dpa/NAN)Journalists from the BBC, The Economist, the Financial Times, The Guardian and the New York Times, were all on Wednesday barred from attending the official presentation of China’s new leadership team.
A move the local foreign correspondents club described as “a punishment.”
“The presentation of the new Politburo Standing Committee was a high profile news event and therefore it was “hard to avoid the conclusion that these media organisations have been singled out to send a message.
“Using media access as a tool to punish journalists whose coverage the Chinese authorities disapprove of is a gross violation of the principles of press freedom,” the Foreign Correspondents Club of China (FCC) said.
The BBC’s China editor Carrie Gracie said that no official reason was given “but unofficially journalists were told their reporting was to blame.”
“A sign of China’s growing determination to control the message at home and abroad,” Gracie said.
“Maybe someone didn’t get Xi Jinping’s 68-pg memo on dawn of more open, confident ‘new era’?,” the Financial Times’ Beijing bureau chief Tom Mitchell tweeted.
President Xi Jinping told reporters who did attend the meeting that “lavish praise” from others was not needed, however “objective reporting and constructive suggestions” were welcome, the official Xinhau news agency reported. (dpa/NAN)
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Edited by Celine-Damilola Oyewole/Sadiya Hamza