Joel Keep and Nila Liu, The Defector. SBS News, Sept 5, 2016 http://www.sbs.com.au/news/feature/defector
("Read the Chinese version here 点击查看中文报道: which is titled 前中国官媒记者揭露人民网舆情监控内幕)
Quote:
"Her name is Jun Mei Wu [《人民网》湖北分社前记者吴君梅], but she asks people to call her Rebecca.
"Her work would take her from monitoring the online chat rooms of average Chinese citizens to snooping around the boardrooms of big-time industrial enterprise – encountering along the way a system of kickbacks, censorship and enforced loyalty that made sure everyone stayed in line.
"Chuyuan Technology Ltd, which for a time produced 30 per cent of the world's dye intermediate for textile production at its 120-hectare site outside Wuhan. * * * What the company also did was dump unknown quantities of poisonous effluent into the Yangtze River [Local government would levy a small fine.] 'This was our arrangement: Chuyuan would pay us [Hubei branch of People's Daily] $119,000 per year, and we would hold off on reporting any of these things that were affecting local people,' she explains. 'In addition to that, Chuyuan would get advertising space – as well as good press in our reportage.' * * * News magazines and other arms of state-sanctioned media ran horror stories on the beleaguered Chuyuan site, and on provincial authorities' failure to intervene. All the while, the People's Daily stayed silent. * * * 'At the end of every month,' she explains, 'each reporter received an envelope stuffed with 10,000 to 20,000 yuan. That was the norm.'
" 'Everyone is involved in corruption at some level under the Communist regime, and not just in the media,' Jun Mei says. 'Even those right at the top.'