Imagethief wants to send his heartiest congratulations to the party secretary of Liaoning's Xifeng county and his crack team of cadres. 2008 is less than two weeks old and they are already in serious contention for dumb media scandal of the year thanks to their ham-fisted attempts to suppress media coverage of a scandal involving the imprisonment of a local businesswoman.

I won't recall all the details of the case here. You can find out everything you need to know from David Bandurski of the indispensable China Media Project. In his first report, from two days ago, he discussed how Xifeng officials came to Beijing in an attempt to arrest the Beijing-based journalist who had reported on the scandal. They alleged defamation and claimed that the journalist had been paid by family members of the imprisoned woman to write a negative story.

Mr. Bandurski uses the case to recount some of the difficulties facing Chinese journalists who attempt to report on events outside their own regions. Given the degree of control that authorities exercise over local media, cross-regional reporting has been one of the bright spots for Chinese investigative journalism:

The brazen actions of local officials in Xifeng demonstrate the new and changing pressures facing journalists attempting to carry out cross-regional reporting, or yidi jiandu (异地监督), in China.

Cross-regional reporting, which involves media from one province or city carrying out investigative reporting in another region or area, has typically afforded media more opportunities to tackle tougher stories. As such stories — about corruption, for example — do not implicate officials in their corner of China’s vast bureaucracy, media have generally been able to pursue them without the immediate fear that they will be censored or otherwise punished.

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In recent years, Chinese journalists have reported a number of tactics used by provincial and local officials to curb cross-regional reporting, including you-scratch-my-back-I-scratch-yours pacts in which local party leaders agree to discourage investigative reporting by media under their immediate control.

But it seems bundling your heavies into a car and driving across provincial borders to arrest troublesome journalists on trumped-up charges might be going too far. Yesterday Mr. Bandurski posted a follow-up report covering the consequences of the attempted suppression. Today the story went mainstream in the Washington Post. What's interesting here is not the foreign coverage, but the wave of outrage that has swept through the Chinese media (and, naturally, the Internet). The case has drawn the ire of everyone from the People's Daily on down. So far, the coverage has not been harmonized, although that may yet happen.

Out of this we are treated once again to elegant proof of a timeless public relations truth: The best way to compound a crisis is to be busted trying to cover it up. This applies even in China and even to the government. The Xifeng county authorities have managed to blow a local scandal into nationwide outrage at near record-speed. They did it without even having to poison an entire river in the process, as Jilin provincial officials had done when they were caught trying to suppress news of the Songhua River benzene disaster of 05. Another superb example was when the superbly-named China Railway 12th Bureau Group Company got caught trying to hush up the death of workers excavating for new Beijing subway lines last April.

But so far as I know, no one has tried the simple scandal-propelling expedient of enraging the entire Chinese national press corps. This is truly innovative, and the Xifeng county authorities deserve due recognition for their efforts. I'm pleased to see them getting that very recognition in the pages of Chinese newspapers. The Xifeng authorities have successfully ensured that their local scandal has received nationwide attention at the same time they've wiped out whatever chance may once have existed of getting a sympathetic hearing from any media not based in Xifeng. When I'm dispensing the Imagethief awards for dumb PR at the end of the year (Thievies?) I'll be sure to give this case consideration.

But there is a lesson for Chinese media in all of this too. It's interesting that the allegation of media corruption was the one the Xifeng authorities reached for right away. The problem is that its a credible allegation for all but the most blue-chip of Chinese media (and perhaps even for them) thanks to the dire state of media ethics in China. Payment for stories, or to withhold negative stories, is endemic, and such charges are easily thrown about. A few Chinese media organizations have come to realize the value of a reputation for probity, but the industry as a whole remains swampy and therefore vulnerable to assaults on its credibility.

The answer is for the industry to collectively improve its ethics and self-policing (and that means PR companies too, by the way). The government should be encouraging this, and there have been recent attempts to improve media regulation. Unfortunately, the central government's tendency to shut down coverage of things it doesn't like probably serves to undermine the growing sense of mission that might promote further development.

This is China, after all, where noble things remain more easily said than done.

Update:

ESWN has translated Southern Metropolis Daily's interview with Zhu Wenna, the journalist at the heart of this issue.