There are few people in the media whose basketball acumen I respect more than Harvey Araton of the Times. Harvey is in Beijing for the Olympics, and filed this hilarious blog entry about the restrictive media policies implemented by the Chinese government.
During a government-arranged media trip to Tiananmen Square, Harvey learned that interview requests had to be submitted well in advance, in writing. And it reminded him of trying to do his reporting work at a Knicks game.
On a bus ride to Tiananmen Square Tuesday afternoon that was organized by the Beijing Organizing Committee, I had a weird flashback that I was at Madison Square Garden, saying hello to Brendan Suhr, trying to circumvent The Dolan Rules.
Suhr was on the now-disbanded staff of Isiah Thomas the last couple of years, and when I would make an occasional appearance at a Knicks game it seemed natural to walk over, catch up with someone I’d known going back to his days as Chuck Daly’s assistant with the Bad Boys of Auburn Hills, Mich. Invariably, a Knicks public relations person, typically Jonathan Supranowitz, would materialize, as if he had been watching on hidden camera. He would remind me that if I wanted to speak with an assistant coach, I had to make a prior request.
Did the Dolans develop their long-panned public relations policies from the Chinese?
Harvey's missive inspired me to research the government media policies implemented by current Communist Party chairman Hu Jintao. Here is the explanation from Wikipedia -- a shorter and seemingly less restrictive media policy than the one in effect at Madison Square Garden.
Despite initial expectations that Hu was a "closet liberal", Hu has shown a fairly hard-line approach to liberalisation of the media.
The media has been given greater latitude in reporting many topics of popular concern, such as the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, as well as into malpractices at the local level. The government has also been responsive to criticism of its media policy, for example in response to the SARS epidemic, and in regard to public commemorations of popular, but deposed, former leader Hu Yaobang
Hu has been very cautious with regards to the Internet, choosing to censor politically sensitive material to a degree more strict than the Jiang era. In February 2007, Hu embarked on further domestic media controls that restricted primetime TV series to "morally correct" content—he objected to lowbrow programming including some reality shows—on all Chinese TV stations, and listed "20 forbidden areas" of coverage on news reporting.
Here's an AP story about the ongoing clash between media and the Chinese government related to the Olympics. Hu should have hired some of the Garden's security staff.