China Warns It's Compiling a Journalist Blacklist

After you thought you knew all about the Chinese government's censorship tricks, a new, more outrageous one pops right up.

China Free Press via Boxun News reports that China's State Administration of Press and Publications is putting together a blacklist of journalists who have the audacity to report news as they see it.

This is the first time ever that the regime is creating a database containing "all violations and transgressions of Communist Party guidelines on the part of Chinese reporters."

No word on the massive size of such a database, but what we agree with China Free Press report that the warning will serve as a powerful deterrent for journalists and bloggers not to deviate from the party's dictums.

Chinese journalists are privately and online expressing strong opposition to this heavy-handed intimidation effort in a bid by officialdom to reduce the increasing amount of critical reporting by Chinese journalists in official publications and on blogs and websites inside and outside China.

The blacklist threatens to use the sanctions of banning from publishing for set periods of time, rescinding of official journalist credentials, and legal prosecution for offenders.

As if journalists and bloggers in China did not have enough to worry about already (see here and here).