Australian state broadcaster SBS will stop airing content from two Chinese state news outlets on Friday after a human rights group accused SBS of airing forced prisoner confessions filmed by the Chinese outlets.
Safeguard Defenders, an Asian human rights group, contacted SBS on Thursday and alleged China Global Television Network (CGTN) and China Central Television (CCTV) have broadcast on SBS “at least 56 confessions of prisoners held under duress or torture between 2013 and 2020.”
“SBS has received a complaint which it is currently reviewing,” a spokesperson for the Australian tax-payer funded media outlet said on March 4.
“Given the serious concerns it raises, and the complexity of the material involved, we have made the decision to suspend the broadcast of the overseas-sourced CGTN and CCTV news bulletins while we undertake an assessment of these services,” the spokesperson added.
SBS has aired 15 minutes of CGTN in Mandarin and 30 minutes of CCTV in English as part of its “World Watch” international news program for years with a disclaimer that the programs “may not reflect SBS standards and may contain distressing material.”
Safeguard Defenders successfully lobbied the British TV regulator Ofcom to strip CGTN of its local broadcast license on February 4 after finding that CGTN is “ultimately controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.”
Ofcom concluded that Star China Media Limited (SCML), the license-holder for CGTN service, “did not have editorial responsibility for CGTN’s output. As such, SCML does not meet the legal requirement of having control over the licensed service, and so is not a lawful broadcast licensee.”
“[W]e consider that CGTNC would be disqualified from holding a license, as it is controlled by a body which is ultimately controlled by the Chinese Communist Party,” the British regulator added.
There is no equivalent license to revoke in Australia, however. “Instead, it is up to the discretion of SBS as to what it broadcasts,” the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) noted on Friday.
One week after Ofcom revoked CGTN’s U.K. broadcast license, Chinese government officials banned broadcasts of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)’s World News within China and Hong Kong on February 12.
China’s National Radio and Television Administration claimed BBC World News reports on China had “seriously violated” a requirement to be “truthful and fair,” harmed Chinese interests, and undermined China’s national unity.
The publicly-funded Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK) announced it would no longer air BBC radio news programming as it had done for years in the former British colony.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.