AI总结
- 核心结论：中国媒体环境下的严苛审查机制催生了“新闻敲诈”现象，媒体为生存和通过负面报道牟利，形成了灰色产业链。
- 结构逻辑：
- 现象引入：通过浙江案例引出“新闻敲诈”定义，即利用负面虚假信息勒索企业。
- 历史演变：回顾从2002年至今的典型案例，展示该行为在行业内的蔓延。
- 深度分析：分析政府对“正能量”新闻的强制要求及媒体商业化困境，指出制度性因素是根源。
- 关键信息：
- 关键概念：新闻敲诈（News extortion）、正能量报道（Positive energy）。
- 核心痛点：媒体因缺乏订阅收入被迫通过勒索或变相广告获利；审查制度使负面新闻易被滥用及处理。
- 问题导向：
- 问题：为何“新闻敲诈”在中国屡禁不止？
- 回答：媒体商业生存压力与政府审查机制的共振；企业倾向于“花钱买平安”而非通过法律维权。
正文
The country’s censors may be making it worse
Illustration: Ben Jones
|Beijing|2 min read
Last month China’s authorities revealed that three men in Zhejiang, an eastern province, had been sentenced for a curious crime known as “news extortion”. They had dug up (or in many cases made up) dirt on over 180 companies that were preparing to go public and then demanded hush money to not publish it on social media. What was most concerning, said prosecutors, was that some companies did not report the extortion to the police, even though the information that the men threatened to publish was not true. Instead they just paid up to avoid disruptions to the listing process. One firm sent 50,000 yuan ($7,000) to make the problem go away; another, 30,000 yuan.
Companies in many places might hope that paying money could spike a negative news report or perhaps generate a positive one. But in China the practice is rife, and is not just limited to online scammers. In a notorious case in 2002 four journalists at Xinhua, the powerful state broadcaster, took cash and gold from a mining company in return for hushing up a deadly explosion. In 2015 an executive at the 21st Century Business Herald, a state-owned broadsheet, was sentenced to four years in prison for extortion. Last year an influential financial blogger was found to have made 700,000 yuan from the companies he wrote about. In one case, he falsely claimed a Shanghai firm’s employee had been stabbed by an unhappy customer, and only removed the article after receiving a hefty fee for “information services”.
The government blames bad apples for the problem. But it is often China’s own strict controls over its media that lead to corrupt behaviour, writes David Bandurski of China Media Project, a research group, in a recent blog post. The job of state-media journalists is often to create “positive energy” with their stories so as to flatter the government. That encourages unethical practices. And making unwelcome news reports vanish attracts little scrutiny in China because, thanks to an army of censors, stories disappear all the time without explanation.
Another problem is that it is especially tough in China for media companies to survive just by selling news. Few have persuaded readers to pay for subscriptions. That is because “the media here aren’t allowed to write about real things,” laments one dispirited former journalist. She spent a year at an online outlet that wrote negative stories about companies until they signed advertising contracts. Extortion, she says, is simply “the most direct and effective method to make money through reporting”.■
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