Commonwealth: Falun Gong & the First Amendment (Excerpt)

June 6, 2003

Does freedom of the press allow newspapers to print lies aimed at undermining a religion? Does freedom of religion allow believers to stop a newspaper's crusade against their faith? The First Amendment guarantees both freedom of religion and freedom of the press. Sometimes these rights come into conflict, but rarely have they clashed so starkly as in the case of the Falun Gong meditation movement versus China Press, a Manhattan-based daily that caters to immigrants from Mainland China living in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, Chicago and other U.S. cities. China Press, which describes itself as "accurate" and "balanced," was founded in 1990 and has a circulation of nearly 120,000. In recent years, it has run numerous reports assailing Falun Gong.

Falun Gong first came to the public attention in the United States in 1999. That was the year the Chinese government banned it after ten thousand [practitioners] surprised officials by demonstrating for religious freedom outside government offices. At the time, the Chinese were trying to convince the world that Beijing would be a model site for the 2008 Olympics. Deeply embarrassed, the government declared Falun Gong Public Enemy Number 1. [Practitioners] were imprisoned and, it is alleged, many were tortured. Not content to crush the movement at home, the People's Republic has tried to weaken Falun Gong in the United States. This is where China Press comes in.

Egged on by Beijing, powerful figures in the Chinese immigrant community have excoriated Falun Gong's small, steadfast group in the United States. [Practitioners] claim that they have been excluded from Chinese-American parades, attacked physically, and subjected to an unrelenting smear campaign in the Chinese-language press. China Press, they say, has carried propaganda that claims Falun Gong is responsible for [... (slanderous words)] China Press, they say, has also carried charges that Falun Gong practitioners engage in "many" illegal activities here, and has advocated that the United States ban the organization.

Dozens of Falun Gong [practitioners] are pursuing a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn that seeks to stop such attacks. The plaintiffs charge that China Press and (to a much lesser extent) the 181,000-circulation Sing Tao Daily have "acted as an unofficial mouthpiece for the Chinese government" and have intended to prevent Falun Gong [practitioners] from exercising "their First Amendment privileges of association and expression." The case raises serious First Amendment issues, so serious that China Press has retained famed First Amendment expert Floyd Abrams, who counseled the New York Times in the landmark Pentagon Papers case.

Documents filed by Falun Gong in the lawsuit show that China Press's coverage made no effort to present the other side to the story. For example, Beijing's persecution of Falun Gong is amply described on the U.S. State Department's Web site's "Annual Report on International Religious Freedom." The State Department mentions "numerous credible reports that police and security personnel abused, tortured, and even killed Falun Gong practitioners." The report also notes that, on a broad scale, followers were forced to recant their beliefs or face torture, and that "many thousands of Falun Gong practitioners are serving extrajudicial administrative sentences in reeducation-through-labor camps."

Still, what does that have to do with Falun Gong [practitioners] in the United States? In affidavits, the plaintiffs linked the negative press coverage to anti-Falun Gong street violence in Manhattan's Chinatown and to unraveling family ties. One Brooklyn woman, for example, said that the negative coverage had led her husband to demand that she renounce the meditation practice because he feared she would turn into a murderer.

[...]

It's the party line. When a Chinese diplomat spoke at China Press's tenth anniversary celebration, he quoted then-President Jiang Zemin praising the paper, and immediately launched into an attack on Falun Gong [...].

In court papers, the attorney for Falun Gong likened China Press to a newspaper controlled by Germany during the 1930s -- one that constantly accused Jews of being part of a cult what committed random acts of murder, kidnapping, and child abuse, and that called for Jews to be harassed and barred from parading. [...]

Paul Moses teaches journalism at Brooklyn College/CUNY.