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Chinese guard manhandles reporter during Winter Olympics live report. Let’s ask Pelosi’s advice.

February 5, 2022 | | Print Article

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It’s hard out here for a journalist operating in China, and one Dutch journalist has the video evidence to prove it.

While reporting live from the Beijing Winter Olympics this Friday, journalist Sjoerd den Daas of the Dutch broadcaster NOS was seen being manhandled and pulled away from the camera by the Chinese Communist Party’s “goons,” as The Daily Beast put it.

According to NOS, it was no anomaly.

“Unfortunately, this is increasingly becoming a daily reality for journalists in China,” the broadcaster wrote in a tweet published after the incident.

The video evidence can be seen below courtesy NOS:

The good news is that Daas was “fine” and “able to finish his story a few minutes later,” according to NOS. What remains unclear is why he was hassled.

The Daily Beast suspects it was because “he was reporting from a dark street corner rather than from inside the glitzy Bird’s Nest stadium, where the Chinese government was staging an opening ceremony to show off China to the world.”

The opening ceremony has been panned by critics as pure CCP “propaganda“:

The bad news, as noted earlier, is that Daas’ treatment is a daily occurrence for all foreign journalists operating in the Communist hellhole.

Speaking with a Dutch tabloid outlet, NOS editor-in-chief Marcel Gelauff reportedly said that the clip of Daas being manhandled is “a painful illustration” of this reality.

“Sjoerd has often told and shown that it is difficult as a journalist in China. There is a far-reaching tendency to curtail freedoms, and this may be even stronger because of corona,” he added.

Indeed, as previously reported, everybody at the Olympics, including journalists, is being forced to download an app, My2022, that critics have described as an extraordinary surveillance threat.

Because of CCP’s shady behavior, some journalists have been advised “to leave their cell phones at home and use burners to stop Chinese spooks from tracking their activities,” according to The Daily Beast.

Meanwhile, the Committee to Protect Journalists has advised journalists to “[c]reate a new work email specifically for the trip” and “[a]ssume your hotel room is under surveillance.”

“Any call made using a hotel landline or cell phone is not encrypted and can be intercepted. … Any conversation you have in your hotel room may be subject to eavesdropping,” the New York-based nonprofit advised last month.

While these recommendations may sound extraordinary, what’s truly extraordinary, according to experts, is how far the CCP is willing to go to target journalists.

“A report from the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China released last month found foreign journalists have faced increasing intimidation in the country in recent years, with tactics including social media trolling, assaults, account hacking, visa denials, and vexatious lawsuits,” according to The Daily Beast.

Journalists also face the risk of arrest and indefinite detention.

“Haze Fan, a staffer in Bloomberg’s Beijing bureau, has spent more than a year behind bars; she’s been accused of violating national-security laws, but the authorities haven’t offered more information about her case,” according to Columbia Journalism Review.

“Cheng Lei, an Australian citizen and friend of Fan’s who worked for a Chinese state broadcaster, has been in detention for even longer, also on national-security grounds. A year ago this week, Cheng’s family spoke out about the toll on her young children in Australia, who don’t know when they’ll see their mom again.”

Dissident Chinese citizens are currently facing the same toll as well.

“China is clamping down especially tightly on dissidents as the Games get underway, jailing some, putting others under house arrest, and further curbing critics’ access to social media,” CJR notes.

All this comes as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi faces backlash for encouraging U.S. Olympic athletes to not dare speak out against the CCP’s notorious abuses.

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Vivek Saxena
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