|HT|
Reporters Without Borders, an international non-profit organisation that aims to safeguard the right to information, dubbed China the "world's biggest captor of journalists" as it claimed that the country is holding over a score of media workers under detention. Those journalists have been detained for reporting and publishing content deemed "sensitive" by the ruling Communist Party, the watchdog also informed in its latest report titled 'An unprecedented RSF investigation: The Great Leap Backwards of Journalism in China'. "At least 127 journalists (professional and non-professional) are currently detained by the regime," it said in the report. "The simple act of investigating a “sensitive” topic or publishing censored information can result in years of detention in unsanitary prisons, where ill-treatment can lead to death," the international body added.
More than half of those include 71 Uyghur journalists, according to the report. Since 2016, in the name of the "fight against terrorism", the Beijing regime has been conducting a violent campaign against the Uyghurs.
The report elucidated how the Chinese government is forcing journalists to become the mouthpiece of their regime. According to the report, journalists need to undergo 90-hour annual training partly focusing on Xi Jinping’s "Thought" in order to receive and renew their press cards.
(Except for the headline and the pictorial description, this story has not been edited by THE DEN staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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