I actually have mixed feelings about this case. First the facts:

Nine journalists from eight media organizations have received jail sentences ranging from one and half years to 16 years for taking bribes to cover up a deadly coal mine accident in north China, the General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) announced Tuesday. (Xinhua)

Pretty clear cut good guys versus bad guys here. Well, actually I don’t see a lot of good guys. The bad guys include:

1. Coal mine owner

2. Journalists who took money

3. Media organizations (the ones who knew about it)

4. Local government officials (the ones who knew about it)

How could I possibly have mixed feelings about this case? Well, first consider that there was a large group of journalists here from quite different organizations:

A total of 10 journalists took bribes from the owner of a coal mine in Weixian county, of Zhangjiakou city, in northern Hebei Province, in return for not reporting an explosion on July 14, 2008, in which 35 people died, said the GAPP statement.

The media organizations included were national, industry (trade journals) and local, and here is where I see some potential issues. Think about the larger context here. You had a coal mine accident, many of which have occurred over the years and generate a great deal of negative media coverage.

Once the story gets out on one of these mining accidents, the mine owners are in serious trouble and might face severe penalties; enforcement of safety standards is spotty, but certainly tougher after an accident. Moreover, if the accident occurred because the mine was not safe (pretty much always the case), then local officials are also potentially on the hook.

Put that together and you have a lot of people who are strongly motivated to cover their asses. Paying off some reporters to keep the story under wraps seems like a very reasonable solution from the mine owner’s perspective. One wonders, though, if any local officials knew about this or were otherwise complicit in the cover-up.

This is important because you have some local reporters involved. The ones from national outlets or trade journals were probably somewhat insulated from local officials’ pressure, but the local journos would find it very difficult to say no if an official told them to stay quiet.

This is complete speculation. I have no idea whether any officials were involved at all in this cover up. Moreover, all of these reporters were on the take (one of them took RMB 200K), reporter-driven blackmail is not unheard of, and people actually died in this accident — the reporters should be punished accordingly.

That being said, it would certainly be within the realm of possibility that these guys were taken aside and told that they could take the money and shut up or, if they published, they would be punished in some fashion. The local reporters in particular would have been screwed either way.