Journalist ponders suing portal over blog entry deletion

A mainland reporter who blew the whistle on Sanlu is considering suing internet portal Tianya.cn after his blog entry recounting his struggles to report the scandal were deleted.

In his blog posting on Sunday, Jian Guangzhou , who works for the Shanghai-based Oriental Morning Post, said he was not the first to link babies developing kidney stones to tainted milk formula, but he was the first to identify the Sanlu Group and its products on Thursday in his newspaper report of 14 sick babies in Gansu province . His post first appeared on Tianya.cn on Sunday and he recounted his fear of a backlash over naming Sanlu, his struggle with his own conscience and the ensuing battle with Sanlu management. The entry was quickly picked up by other media outlets before it was removed yesterday. His blog was also partially inaccessible.

'I received online clearance from Tianya webmasters for the post to go ahead, but three days later, I got another message saying the post was removed because it failed to conform to Tianya.cn's set of posting rules,' Jian said. 'I don't think I've written one sentence crossing the line, and I've been objective in my writing without any radical comment.'

Tianya.cn was not available for comment, but the struggle with censorship and interests of big corporations have underscored the dilemma journalists face either to be truthful to themselves and journalistic ethics or to toe the official line.

The mainland coverage of the milk powder scandal has been muzzled, as most outlets, including the Oriental Morning Post, have been publishing Xinhua reports in the past few days.

Jian added that he suspected the deletion of his post also had something to do with a blog posting yesterday questioning the ethics of mainland search engine Baidu after it was revealed that Baidu had charged some big corporate names such as dairy producers Yili and Mengniu 5 million yuan (HK$5.7 million) each to screen out 'negative news'. But Baidu said it had refused to do so for Sanlu when earlier approached by the dairy producer. Likening Baidu to 'an online mafia' in his recent posting, Jian questioned the company's ethics in collecting money tantamount to 'protection fees'.