2015-05-07
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The latest edition of Southern Weekly is on sale at a newsstand in Wuxi, east China’s Jiangsu province, Jan. 10, 2013.
ImagineChina
China’s powerful cyberspace regulator on Thursday said it had issued a whitelist of 381 media organizations that are permitted to syndicate online news content in a bid to stamp out “false information” on the country’s tightly controlled Internet.
The whitelist features many of the country’s best-known official media outlets, all of which are subject to close censorship by the ruling Chinese Communist Party, and the majority of which are traditional print and broadcast media with an online presence.
Just over a quarter of the places on the list are taken up by media outlets under the direct control of party or government departments, including party stalwarts the People’s Daily Online and the online version of the People’s Liberation Army newspaper, the Cyberspace Administration said in a statement on its website.
The rest are given over to provincial and regional media, out of which just 20 slots are allocated to online-only news media, and limited to regional government websites like Anhui Online.
Cutting-edge media like the Guangzhou-based Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper and the 21st Century Business Herald don’t appear on the list, meaning that they can’t syndicate their news content to other sites.
“The Cyberspace Administration of China has published this list of which news organizations are permitted to syndicate online content in a bid to strictly limit the sources of news used by online news and information providers,” the agency said in a statement on its website on Thursday.
“[The aim is] to give less and less room for the transmission of false information, and to preserve an environment conducive to the orderly dissemination of news and information,” it said.
“All websites must limit the news they provide online to content sourced from news organizations on the list,” it said.
“The source of content must be clearly identified, and news content must not be misrepresented.”
The move is in keeping with the long-running policy of the party’s powerful Central Propaganda Department, according to Guangzhou-based online writer and activist Ye Du.
“They are issuing this so-called whitelist now, under the general heading of gaining total ideological control over the Internet,” Ye told RFA.
He said policies governing the sourcing of online news content have always been in place, but are now being formalized and made public.
Ye said publications like the Southern Metropolis Daily and the Southern media group had been on internally circulated lists of banned content for some time.
“It’s totally to be expected that they didn’t make it onto the whitelist,” he said.
