CCTV beats libel charges

Shenyang Evening News
May 7, 2008

Today’s Shenyang Evening News ran an editorial on its front page about CCTV defeating a lawsuit in which a towel factory sued the state-owned broadcaster for libel.

The news was first broken by The Beijing Times on May 6 with the headline ‘CCTV exempted from apologizing for its untruthful reporting’.

CCTV’s Weekly Quality Report is a weekly program that exposes defective and low-quality products. On March 27, 2007, the program reported that towels manufactured by a company in Jinzhou (晋州), Hebei Province, contained cancer-inducing chemicals. According to an official test report released after the broadcast of the program, though the towels were of low-quality and failed to meet the standards, there was no evidence that the towels contained carcinogenic substances.

The towel factory subsequently sued CCTV, claiming that their report had hurt its reputation and caused business losses. They also demanded a public apology. The Beijing First Intermediate Court dismissed the charges, saying that “manufacturers should tolerate sharp criticism from the public and the media.”

The Shengyang Evening News editorial celebrated the court’s decision as a

victory for supervision of public opinion. It argues that no media can guarantee 100％ accuracy, and it would be impossible for the media to function if no small mistakes are allowed. “The media is not a law enforcement department, therefore could not obtain evidence by force” the article says.

The article also mentions the public’s concern that the case may undermine media ethics by giving it more leverage to get away with untruthful reporting.

Beijing Times
May 6, 2008

Another editorial in Beijing Youth Daily compares this case with the 1960 New York Times Co. v. Sullivan case, which extended the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech to libel cases brought by public officials, and reshaped the American libel law. The rationale behind the Supreme Court’s judgement was that “debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.” (Justice William J. Brennan Jr.)

The Beijing News also ran an article about the case today. The article argues that in this duel between the media and company, the media side — CCTV — is overwhelmingly more powerful than the other side, which is a small, unknown towel factory. The article says that the result would have been different if the plaintiff was one of the prominent, large state-owned companies, if the defendent was a less influential media organization, or if a local court had presided over the case instead of a Beijing court.

Different from the United States, case law is not in China’s law system, which means judges don’t need to follow precedents. So even though CCTV won its case, it doesn’t mean any other media will be immune from similar charges.

The big question of how much more reporting latitude China’s media will get is still far from being settled.