Journalists’ group ‘dismayed’ by treatment at Beijing Winter Olympics

Reporting conditions for journalists covering the Beijing Winter Olympics fell short of international standards despite assurances from the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the Foreign Correspondents’ Club (FCCC) of China has said.

The club said it was “dismayed” that at a time when global attention was trained on China more than ever the government and Olympic officials still failed to uphold their own rules on accredited foreign media. Instead “government interference occurred regularly during the Games”, both inside and outside venues, when journalists tried to interview athletes and local residents.

The FCCC also highlighted significant online trolling and abuse of journalists who had covered Olympic events and related stories. “In some cases these attacks were fuelled by Chinese state media accounts and Chinese diplomats,” it said, describing an observed aspect of state-backed online harassment and propaganda campaigns.

The FCCC statement listed a number of claims of intimidation, obstruction and harassment, including some that the IOC – widely criticised for granting the Games to a government accused of crimes against humanity – had dismissed as “isolated incidents”.

“After an Olympic ski event, a foreign reporter was prevented by a Beijing Olympic official from interviewing a Hong Kong athlete in the Games’ mixed zone, a space supposedly governed by international Olympic rules,” the statement said. “Most visibly, a reporter with the Dutch national broadcaster NOS was hauled off camera during a live TV broadcast by plainclothes security men, despite the fact that he had been standing in a spot police directed him to only minutes earlier.”

During the opening ceremony, the NOS’s Sjoerd den Daas was reporting