Blogging on the edge

For my final Journalism Ethics class, we discussed the ethics of blogging. I thought this would be particularly important since most of my students get their news from blogs. China Daily and Xinhua are better than they were 20 years ago, but they are still official government organs.
We started by discussing ways to tell if blogs are accurate and reliable--does the blogger cite sources, dates, names? do other blogs/sources support this information? has the blogger been reliable in the past? are the writer's biases and reporting methods transparent?
Then I projected some blogs from global voices online I had read recently--about the wealth of children of party officials (2932 of 3220 billionaires in China are children of senior officials and much of their money is made illegally), about corruption in the Nanjing housing administration and a detailed story about a protester who was detained and sent to a mental institution (see below).
My students knew about most of the stories and weren't surprised by any of this. The information genie is out of the bottle. But how will people respond when they get continual confirmation that democracy protesters are being arrested, government officials are corrupt, unsafe food and environmental pollution are killing people, etc.? (This is not to say that the problems in China are worse than other places--see Bush, George W.--but now information is much more easily available here.)
My hope, I said, is that the information can help them make China better, rather than cause them to lose hope and become cynical.
The story below is rather lengthy but typical of some of the good blog reporting I've discovered (global voices translates blogs from around the world).

China: Protestors and petitioners penned up into madhouse

Monday, December 8th, 2008 @ 09:06 UTC
by Bob Chen

“Years later, the entire humanity will be astonished at what happens today!!!!!!!!!”
This is a comment people left after a news story. It is a story about petitioning, protest and madhouse. Reading the story, I am almost drowned by a sense of desperation infused in what Mr. Sun has gone through all these years, but also very much touched by Mr. Shi’s courage to expose such a scandal to public. I know, this would be a story worth record, and translation.
In China, it’s a long tradition that people wronged by their hometown officials would trek to Beijing to appeal for justice. It is called petitioning, a mild way of protest. As mild as it is, however, no local government involved would easily let the petitioner go, and interruption, detain, threat are never unusual. And now, a more civilized way is employed, that is, asylum, or, madhouse. That’s where the story started.
Xintai Town, Shangdong.
Mr. Sun-fawu, 57, got off the car and looked around for his companion he was to meet. Yet no one was there. All in a sudden, a microbus rushed to him and stopped, 3 people coming off and closing him in. One of them was identified as An-shizhi, Sun recalled, who is the director of the Petitioning Office (the official agency handles complaints) in the town.
“what are doing?”
“to find a job in Beijing”
“Looking for a job? No, you are to petition. You are not let go!”
Two men came up, snatched away the cellphone Sun was to use for police-calling, and pushed him into the microbus.
Sun’s nightmare started. The place he was sent to is exactly the City Asylum, where the mentally disordered stay. The government men left him there.
Sun yelled to the doctor coming to him, “I am not lunatic! I am just going to petition!”
The shout was heard by many “patients” there, including Mr. Shi, a close friend to Sun later.
The doctor says, “I don’t care whether you are ill. You are sent by the town government, and I’ll treat you as of psychosis.”
What he later went through was that:
“I had all my limbs tied to the bed legs, and head wrapped up by a mask.” Sun heard some one saying “pouring the medicine quickly”, and his mouth was forced to open. Mandible clutched, the pills ran into his throat. At 7 pm, Dr. Zhu gave Sun a shot, and he then lost all his consciousness.
During his days there, Zhu has thought to escape, though he claimed time over time again he was normal. He pleaded the dean. But the answer was as cold as the patient room, that “only those sent you here sign an agreement, you are allowed to go”. And a “suggestion” followed, “ask your family to find the government.
But how to? Sun asked himself, with no phone with him.
Sun’s grief
Sun’s grief dates back to several years ago, when the land in his village sunk so much that it was no more arable due to the thriving mining at the place. Since 1988, the mine owners have compensated the affected villagers for a few times.
According to the criteria, Sun’s family could get over 40 thousand. But as Sun and some other villagers said, over 300 households in the village got no compensation at all.
But the village officials insisted the fund has been distributed. Since 2001, villagers voted Sun as one of their delegates, to complain to the town government. The city inspection group, however, alleged that the fund has indeed been allocated after investigation. The villagers defied, sending more complaints and inquiry of further probe.
Three days later, 1, Oct, at night, over 10 people broke into Sun’s home when he was not there, and hacked down Sun’s son, who got married only 5 days ago, to be seriously injured. Sun’s wife, Zhang-xuefang recalled, those people yelled “We’ll kill out your family if you keep on petitioning.”
Sun didn’t stop. He haunted around town, city, and provincial Petitioning Offices, and even to as far as Beijing. In 2004, he was detained for 14 days, the prosecution being “disrupting social order”. In 2005, he was sentenced to prison, again, but for over 1 year this time.
Then in 2007, a new weapon was put in use. He was put in the asylum.
“Every day I took pills and injection.” Sun was sensitive to medicine. “I felt dizzy, and can’t stand up.”
He stayed there for 3 months, 5 days. Only did he pledged that no more petitioning would he committed was he released.
In 2008, Oct, the story at the beginning of the article happened. This has been his second time to be a “mad man”.
A secret recorder
Mr. Shi, 84, has his own secret mission. Up till now, he has recorded 18 petitioners penned up into the hospital.
He used to go to Beijng to complain the negligence of duty of the local government. In 2006, he was sent by Tianbao government (another one) to the same hospital.
He was called to go out later, but he refused. He required an explanation of such a treatment, and holds that if there is none, he would stay.
No explanation was given, and he stayed. In the 2 years 5 months he spent there, he has been collecting evidence about the petitioners contained in the madhouse.
Sun made a lot of record, writing them on paper slips, sometimes even on used pill boxes. He said, all this was secret, because nurses didn’t allow the “petitioner patients” to talk. The diary and papers were hidden under quilts.
One of his diaries writes:
“some patients kept beating me up, as long as I quarreled with doctors and nurses. After they were gone, the patients would come up and hit me, clutched my neck. They must have been ordered to do so by the doctors.”
Since the second day in the asylum, he was forced to take pills. He would hide the pill down the tongue, and spit them after the nurses turned away. It was soon found out, however. And then, nurses would inspect their tongues every single time. Shi and another patient both said so.
This is the end of the news story. It was released by the well-known Beijing-based paper New Beijing on 8, Dec, and very soon, it has caught the attention of the Chinese blogsphere. The comment at the beginning gained as many as 10000 support clicks on 163.com, and what we see is a gloomy picture of a muzzled world by methods as ridiculous as you can expect. How long has this happened? Would this keep on going if it was not revealed? And we have enough reason to doubt how many more remain undiscovered.
And we are more than shocked. The life in madhouse is expected to be so horrible, that every word, every pleading, every complaint you yelled out would be considered a mad word, and no one would trust you. That's why those petitioners are more than admirable.
Or, the entire society has already been such a madhouse? And finally, will we lose our sense of judgment, that we ourselves would doubt “are we mad”? Is this what we are hoped to be?