Judy Chen, 50, an American citizen and a Falun Gong practitioner, said that she was attacked by a mob of pro-Communist Chinese people supported by the Chinese consul general in the U.S. on May 17, 2008 in Flushing, Queens, but nobody was arrested.
Judy Chen said that she no longer feels safe in Flushing. She is afraid she will be abducted and end up in jail in China.
“Since 1999 we know that the Chinese Communist regime has killed more than 3,000 practitioners in China,” she said. “They sell the healthy organs of Falung Gong practitioners online.”
Erping Zhang, a U.S. spokesman for Falun Gong, said that the crackdown on Falun Gong practitioners started in China in 1999 when the movement was banned. Now it’s taking place in the U.S. too.
According to Zhang, violence escalated after the earthquake in Sichuan Province, China, in May. The Communist party blamed the Chinese community in the U.S. for not being compassionate towards those people in need.
But Zhang believes that the real reason for the attacks is that U.S. Falun Gong practitioners pointed out China’s inadequate response to the earthquake in the international press, and in the process, made China look bad.
The problem with Judy Chen’s story and the explanations of the U.S. spokesman for Falun Gong, Erping Zhang, is that very little of it can be verified. Practically none of it can. Before publishing anything, a reporter needs to check with the Chinese consulate.
Can reporters cover issues where access to sources is limited by language problems and the possibility that one or both sides are trying to manipulate information? Should journalists just ignore certain news because they don’t trust either source, or should they try and recount what is happening, relying on tricky sources and informing readers about these difficulties?
“I called the Chinese embassy three times and finally got to a live person,” said Karina Ioffee, a reporter for the NY City News Service. “A woman mumbled something about Falun Gong not being a religion, but when I tried to ask her further questions she hung up the phone on me. I’m really trying to be fair, but when the other side is totally stonewalling me, there is not much I can do.”
This reporter decided to report the story, stating in the article that the Chinese consulate was repeatedly asked to comment, but declined. Other reporters, conversely, might decide not report it at all.
“We cannot report about Falun Gong under our system of ethics,” said Lou Parajos, editor-in-chief of The Queens Courier. “You can’t write about gossip, rumors and innuendo.”
For Lou Parajos, verifying Falun Gong practitioners’ statements is impossible. So reporters shouldn’t write anything, according to him.
“They say that a friend of a cousin of an uncle of someone went to jail and had their organs transplanted,” said Parajos. “This is fourth-hand information, this is Hollywood, how on earth can you check that? Are you sending a reporter to China to see whether it is true? And even if you do, I don’t think the Chinese would allow anybody to see anything.”
According to Parajos, the only information that can be used in a piece is the information written in the police report.
Parajos, for instance, could write in his paper that Wei Qiu was arrested on June 21 for assaulting a Falun Gong practitioner with a metal steering wheel lock and Ngan T. Yung was arrested on June 16 after allegedly assaulting Mr. Pan Hongyi, vice editor-in-chief of The Epoch Times. Parajos would write this information because it was confirmed by the police.
But if no one had been arrested, would the violence against members of the Falun Gong not been newsworthy? Is it ethical for a reporter not to write a single line about the people who say they are threatened every day if no police report has been filed?
The issue, as Parajos puts it, is a catch-22, but perhaps the solution is to verify all you can and identify the source to the reader.
In Judy Chen’s story, for instance, you can’t verify whether she was actually attacked on May 17, 2008 because there were no witnesses. But you can verify whether there are cases of Falun Gong people assaulted by other members of the Chinese community in Flushing.
On October 5, 2008, as I was filming Judy Chen distributing Falun Gong magazines next to the Flushing library, a woman approached her.
“Are you lying?” said the woman to Judy Chen. Then she grabbed her magazines and threw them on the floor.
