The scene stunned Germany at is breakfast table.

One recent morning, with 240,000 households tuned in to the ZDF television news program Morgen Magazin, viewers watched in disbelief as a live interview from the Great Wall of China near Beijing was broken up by Chinese police.

Correspondent Johannes Hano had just begun the interview when a pair of waving hands suddenly appeared, a surge of police stepped in — there were more than 30 in all — and finally a big hand came down on the camera’s lens and it was all over.

It happened live, on air, as hundreds of thousands of Germans looked on — a public relations disaster for China of the first order.

“We had to stop the segment, of course,” says ZDF’s deputy editor-in-chief Elmar Thevessen from Germany.

Viewers calling in were “surprised” and “angry,” he says.

At a closed-door meeting of world broadcasters in Beijing this month, Sun Weijia, the Beijing Olympic Games organizing committee’s media chief expressed “regret” for what happened.
He promised no such incident would happen again, officials say.

But will it? Will the international media finally enjoy the “complete freedom” Beijing organizers publicly promised on July 12, 2001 — the day before they won the rights to host the 2008 Summer Games?

“We will give the media complete freedom to report when they come to China,” Beijing organizing committee vice-president Wang Wei pledged at a press conference back then.

But even before these Games have begun, many say that promise has already been broken.
Recently, Human Rights Watch lambasted the Chinese government for obstructing and threatening foreign journalists — and their sources — in violation of continued pledges to ensure press freedom.

In a scathing 71-page report, the human rights watchdog documented in detail how foreign correspondents in China face harassment and intimidation by “government officials or their proxies” when they pursue stories that embarrass authorities, expose wrongdoing or document social unrest.

The effects of violating those pledges “will linger long after the last athletes have left Beijing,” the organization’s Sophie Richardson warned.

But that warning went unheeded.
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