Without free press, China hides disasters

By ROBERT WHITCOMB
PROVIDENCE JOURNAL
One of the many good things about the press in America is that it makes it a lot tougher to hide environmental disasters.
Consider how Chinese officials lied about a toxic-chemical spill from a chemical factory in northeast China last week. In the past few days, a 50-mile-long slick of cancer-causing benzene has flowed down the Songhua River through Harbin, a gritty port city of 3.8 million. Officials for days denied that the plant had leaked anything toxic and then asserted that Harbin's water supply was shut down because of maintenance, not because of the spill. It recalled memories of Chinese officials' covering up the SARS epidemic.
It also brought back memories of the 1986 nuclear accident in Chernobyl, in the Soviet Union, wherein the government tried mightily at first to suppress news about the catastrophe.
Indeed, for that matter, the French government tried the same thing when the radioactive cloud from the same disaster drifted over France. French authorities, for fear of causing panic, tried to cover up news of the radiation for a few days, but word got out -- causing something close to panic for a time, especially about France's food supply.
Trying to cover up such perils tends to cause more panic than getting out the word as fast and comprehensively as possible. Distrust of public officials' dubious statements can be fatal to citizens' calm and order. It might be possible to hide a Songhua-style disaster in America, but much more difficult.
Corrective action
And the free press helps makes open societies more supple than dictatorships. The multi-source revelation of nasty things across a wide range of media, as demoralizing as it sometimes can be, leads to correction, and reduces the chances of, if it doesn't always prevent, catastrophes.
Media in open societies tend to over-emphasize the negative, in part because the public tends to find sour and dark events more entertaining than sweetness and light, because journalists generally find it easier to be negative than positive, and because of the free press's still-breathing institutionalized belief in the duty to be a public watchdog.
(As for the old cliche about the duty to "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted," some of the media seem to have it the other way around these days.)
So there's a lot of negativity in the news in a democracy, while news in a dictatorship all too often consists of comforting assertions about the wisdom of the political leadership and of the evils of those who would criticize it. Thus, a country like China, with copious censorship, runaway industrialization and perilously thin environmental protections, is well set up for lethal environmental disasters.
X Robert Whitcomb is The Providence Journal's editorial-page editor. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.