So from 1 March you can't be a journalist in China without a press card. Sounds fair enough.
So says Wang Yong at Shanghai Daily. A couple of excerpts from his opinion piece today:
Only those who abide by the law, have a certain level of education, and are employed by a legal news organisation will be able to apply for a press card.
Sounds fair enough. But where does it leave freelances? Surely this wipes out the whole sector of people who are not employed by a news organisation. And how can young journalists gain experience?
I freelance occasionally. It's innocuous stuff like travel features for 8Days and That's Shanghai. Am I really now banned from doing so? Who's going to enforce it? Maybe I should have got my fake press card in Bangkok for $5.
If the industry fails to regulate itself, the government will step in. The Western model of free entry has its problems. Without government supervision, the public has little remedy for the excesses of news organisations.
What problems? What excesses? The problems of people entering journalism who are not devoted party members, who might actually want to expose the truth on occasions rather than write whitewashes like Wang Yong? The excesses of fair criticism and varied opinion?
Wang asserts later in his article that the measures are primarily designed to root out corruption among journalists. I've heard stories about hacks accepting envelopes of money as they walk into press conferences on condition that they give a good write-up.
But there's another kind of corruption: a corruption of the whole role of the journalist and the writer. And that, I think is where this leads.