Beijing Games broadcasters self-censoring to protect staff

Beijing Olympics broadcasters are dramatically paring back news coverage of sensitive Chinese issues,

Staff in full PPE man a security checkpoint outside a Games venue in Zhangjiakou

Heavyweight global broadcasters who have paid tens of billions of dollars for the rights to the Beijing Winter Olympic Games are dramatically paring back news coverage of sensitive Chinese issues, amid a nervousness about the safety of staff on the ground.

Insiders at the Seven Network, the official broadcasters for Australia, say “we are not taking any chances” and “the Chinese are not up for any criticism”. A detailed memo has been distributed to staff about the sensitivity of their Games coverage.

Australian athletes are also being cautious, with some having taken on board advice to speak up on issues that concern them only once they have finished their competitions and left the country. The Games opening ceremony is next Friday evening, February 4.

Hot topics such as treatment of the Uighers, the whereabouts of tennis player Peng Shuai and the status of Hong Kong and Taiwan are being sidelined to specialist new teams back in home countries, if covered at all.

The BBC, which will broadcast 300 hours of coverage in Britain, has not even referred to China in its promotions for the Games, distancing itself from the country with anonymous graphics of athletes as ice figures.

In a letter obtained by The Weekend Australian, the BBC director general Tim Davie has responded to political concerns, led by the Tory MP Nusrat Ghani, who is a member of the Members of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China.

Ghani asked the BBC “to adhere to its editorial principles in covering what some have called the Genocide Olympics” and that its coverage of the Beijing Olympics “will have to be balanced between Chinese state propaganda and the ongoing Uighur genocide”.

But Davie said it was customary for both BBC News and BBC Sport to cover the Winter Olympics in “the discrete way that our audiences would expect’’. He added that the Winter Olympics would “focus on the sporting events and related sporting stories’’.

US network NBC Universal, which has paid US$7.6bn for the rights to the Games up until the Brisbane 2032 Olympics, is discovering, for the first time, that its demands for wider access to cover news stories as well as broader cultural pieces are falling on deaf ears.

Last month they pared back their on-site team, switching commentators in the high-rating sports of figure skating, alpine skiing and snowboarding from being ringside in Beijing and Zhangjiakou to the NBC’s Connecticut studios. This was because executives feared they would not have control of what was happening to their staff on the ground.

While most of Australia’s commentators are based in Melbourne, Seven has a small mainly technical team of around 40 in China.

The potential sports-washing of China’s reputation throughout February is something that has been also raised in the US.

Republican politicians have sent a letter to Comcast Corp NBCUniversal executives asking about the level of influence the Chinese Communist Party and the IOC has in NBC’s 2022 Winter Olympics programming.

The Beijing Olympics will be the first held under super-strict restrictions on movements, including the broadcasters having to use Chinese drivers, and all media representatives not being able to walk even short distances from the hotel to Games venues.

Movements of all Games participants, including eating meals, are heavily confined to venues, the media centre and hotels or the Olympic village, all within a “closed loop’’ system that prevents journalists from interviewing Chinese people or travelling outside the tightly monitored areas.

German journalists have raised several questions to the IOC about the integrity of the daily Covid PCR testing, which they believe could be exploited to confine and punish media representatives on the pretext they had tested positive. Under rules agreed to by the IOC, positive Covid cases will be kept in isolation facilities, or in a Chinese hospital, until they produce two negative tests, which could for three weeks.

The IOC says a medical review panel — made up of 15 Chinese health officials and five Olympic experts — will look at cases where people are consistently testing positive after a fortnight to try to allow them to leave. In the past few days only one team official has tested positive upon arrival at Beijing airport, compared to 40 other stakeholders, mainly foreign media.

Sarah Cook, research director with Freedom House, said self-censorship by the broadcasters at the Olympics was “very, very problematic” and it could pose difficulties if there is a newsworthy incident, such as an athlete making some sort of protest.

“China wants to make people afraid and self-censor themselves,” she said, adding that to have a completely sterile Olympics broadcast would be “really terrible” and “unfair” and it would encourage Beijing to do it more.

In one foreign embassy Olympic briefing, one concerned journalist queried if it was safe for him to criticise China’s preparations because the mountain zone doesn’t have any snow.

While the 72 pages of “playbook” rules are to enforce China’s zero-Covid strategy, the measures are extreme: Chinese residents have even been told not to assist Games vehicles if they are involved in an accident. Broadcasters are also contained within four different bubbles within the loop system.

Officially broadcast executives are saying that they will reflect China’s place in the world during the coverage of the Games, but in news conferences, insiders have told The Weekend Australian there is mounting concern about the type and intensity of stories to be covered.

“We have people on the ground (for the Olympics) and so we are being very, very cautious about our overall tone, and we will be concentrating almost exclusively on the sport,’’ one senior executive said.

Andrew Georgiou, the president of sports at Discovery, which holds the European Olympic rights, said at the European launch of the coverage that his network wouldn’t shy away from social issues, promising “we are going to address it”.

But his caveat was: “We’re also a sports broadcaster and we will also be focused on athlete performances and what’s going on on the big stage and doing the best we can to show those stories.

“Hopefully the Olympics should shine a light on that and bring all the Olympics back to a really interesting story for the consumer.’’

Olympic executives have conducted masterclasses in obsequiousness at every recent press conference and technical briefing, claiming that the Chinese venues and field of play are ‘’so outstanding, we can have fantastic sport here in Beijing”.

Yet the Lausanne-based organisation has cut short its annual centrepiece, the IOC session, and many of the 100 IOC members are not even coming to the Chinese capital.