Censors Are Sharpening Their Pencils in China

The fireworks hadn’t stopped exploding over Tiananmen Square, celebrating Beijing’s election as host of the 2008 Summer Olympics, when Chinese authorities threw out the ceremonial first Western media ban.

According to CBS News, government officials in Beijing on Friday prohibited the network from transmitting video footage for a news story about the Falun Gong movement.

This was two weeks after another Western journalist was brutally beaten by police while covering a concert by the Three Tenors in Beijing’s Forbidden City.

Welcome to the International Olympic Committee’s Not So Wide Open World of Sports, which for the next seven years will be bringing you the thrill of Beijing’s victory and the agony of a free media trying to report from the scene.

This is what happens when one totalitarian regime, the one ruled by Generalissimo Juan Antonio Samaranch, decides to do a favor for another.

Beijing failed in its attempt to win the 2000 Summer Games, finishing second to Sydney by two votes, so this time, Samaranch pulled the Chinese aside, looked up and down the hallway to make sure the coast was clear and whispered, “Listen up, boys. I’ll show you how it’s done.”

When it comes to manipulating the media, disseminating propaganda and curbing dissent, the Chinese can learn a thing or two from the master. Rough up a journalist? Shut down a video transmission?

How 20th century. Samaranch is light years beyond that. The Samaranch style is to hand-select a few influential journalists from around the globe and flatter them by granting them an audience with the man who would be king if only he could get the IOC executive board to sign off on the crown and scepter.

At this point, you lecture the scribes about such Olympic ideals as “universality” and “inclusion” and wax about the history that could be made with a Beijing victory.

(Yes, that Nobel Peace Prize Samaranch doggedly continues to chase certainly would be historic.)

Next, schedule a bunch of pseudo-news conferences on the eve of the vote to discuss the competing bid cities. Prohibit IOC members from asking any member of the Beijing delegation embarrassing questions about human-rights violations in China. Nod approvingly when an overheated Russian journalist, apparently stumped for a question, exclaims instead, “Such a great city deserves the Olympics!”

Then stand aside and try not to laugh out loud as the democracies of Canada and France get trampled underfoot by the Olympic candidate cited by Amnesty International for executing nearly 1,800 criminals in the last three months. Scoreboard: Beijing 56 votes, Toronto 22, Paris 18.

Not surprisingly, media in Canada and France were dismayed by the charade that played out in Moscow on Friday.

“The fix was always in,” Canada’s national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, declared, “and all the rest was theater. The lopsided final vote exposed Toronto’s fond Olympic hopes as nothing but a childish fairy tale. . . . That old tyrant Juan Antonio Samaranch was always going to have his way, and a little thing like human rights is not part of his equation.”

France’s Le Figaro: “China, thanks to the economic fascination that it exercises, could not have lost, despite a politically questionable and contested regime. Beijing now has seven years to show that the choice was the right one and that Beijing 2008 will not be a bad remake of Berlin 1936.”

Brian Williams of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., his objectivity crushed by disappointment, looked into the television camera and asked, “No doubt, Toronto’s bid was the best--did Samaranch pull the strings?”

The Globe and Mail had that question answered:

“The truth of the matter is Toronto’s bid for the 2008 Games was doomed from the start. From the moment Beijing set its sights on 2008 after losing to Sydney for the right to stage the 2000 Olympics, Toronto’s chances of winning were, at best, second-best.

“Everything was stacked against it, from the historic value of having the world’s greatest sporting spectacle on once-forbidden land to IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch wanting it to happen as a glorious send-off to himself.”

In 1998, France pulled off a spectacular World Cup tournament, highlighted by France’s upset victory over Brazil in a final played in Paris. Three summers later, French media could not believe such an achievement would matter so little in the eyes of the IOC, amounting to less than a third of the votes Beijing received on the final ballot.

“A Slap In The Face” read the front-page headline in Le Parisien. According to the paper, the “announcement of Beijing’s victory in the race to host the 2008 Games was not really unexpected. More surprising was the size of the defeat.”

L’Equipe, the French sports daily, concurred: “Paris believed until the end, but it was lost. . . . The surprise was more the size of the Chinese success and French loss.”

Canada, runner-up Friday in Moscow as it is every day in North America, is more conditioned to roll with the punches.

The Toronto Star advised its readers to “Look at it this way: We’re really a winter sports country and now Vancouver-Whistler [bidding for the 2010 Winter Games] gets to lay down its money in the International Olympic Committee casino.

“Toronto caught a big break here [Friday]. The millions of public money that has gone down the rat hole on this bid is peanuts compared to the billions that would have followed in the next seven years.”

About $6 million in public funds went down that rat hole--”chump change,” according to the Star, when compared to the $40.8-million contract recently given Jerome Williams by the hometown Raptors.

Yes, it could have been worse, much worse. As psychologist Rod Martin told the Star in an article intended to help Canadians cope with the “bereavement” after its Olympic defeat, “Maybe it’s almost a relief now that we didn’t win the Olympics. Because what would we have done if we had?”