Party still has the last word in world of media commentary

Political correctness still rules on the mainland instead of common sense.

More often than not, when liberal-leaning media find ways to get around the omnipresent censorship to speak some truth, they will be taken to task by Communist Party apologists. And they often have to pay a price for daring to defy the state propaganda apparatus.

In the past 10 days two Guangdong-based media outlets - a newspaper and an online news portal - were separately forced to make formal apologies for their challenges to the Communist Party's flagship newspapers.

The first row began when the Beijing Daily, the party's mouthpiece, fired a salvo at the burgeoning commercial news media nearly two weeks ago, blaming their exposure of rampant food-related scandals for stoking public fears about food safety.

'As a result of some media outlets' sensational coverage, it seems all Chinese food products are poisonous, all construction projects are [shoddily built] 'tofu' buildings and all civil servants are corrupt,' it said in a commentary published on May 18. It asserted critical coverage of social ills was irresponsible, appealed only to China-bashers and sceptics in the West and had severely affected social stability.

The newspaper had already encountered controversy less than a week before, when it made a poor show of attacking the United States' role in blind legal activist Chen Guangcheng's escape from illegal house detention and flight to New York.