China has made small concessions to accommodate the Olympic apparatus. People on the Olympic grounds, for example, enjoy “barrier-free internet,” allowing them to circumvent the country’s normal firewall and access websites and online platforms most Chinese cannot.
Explore the Games
- System Failure: A Russian figure skater’s positive test for trimetazidine, a banned medication, has exposed the flaws of anti-doping measures in place at the Olympics.
- Measuring the Medals: Which country is doing best might depend on who’s counting — and how.
- Embracing Mental Health: The echo from Simone Biles’s public struggles in Tokyo is being felt by athletes in Beijing.
- The Sound of Curling: The sport and the bagpipe, a staple at curling tournaments, are bound by a shared history reaching back centuries to Scotland’s lochs.
Still, in most cases, it is as if the two press corps are dancing side by side, inside the same cramped ballroom, to two different songs.
The tone was set at the opening news conference of the Games, when reporters customarily fire questions about various controversies at the president of the International Olympic Committee, Thomas Bach.
First, though, came a question from China Central Television, the state broadcaster. “After two years of dark times,” the reporter asked, “do you feel the coming of spring?”
The whiplash was palpable when a reporter from Reuters then stepped to the microphone to ask Bach about his plans to meet Peng Shuai, the Chinese tennis player who disappeared from public life for weeks after accusing a top government official of sexual assault (Bach did meet her). Stories about Peng continue to be censored in China.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/12/sports/olympics/ioc-press-freedom-china.html
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