Thrust Onto Center Stage

By Laurence Zuckerman

CNN Tokyo bureau chief John Lewis and his four-member crew arrived at Beijing's Tiananmen Square to spend another night covering the standoff between Chinese demonstrators and government troops. Decked out in ponchos and straw hats to protect themselves against the rain, the crew surveyed the scene as tens of thousands of protesters continued to defy the martial-law edict ordering them to disperse. Exhausted after working two straight days with little or no sleep, Lewis and his colleagues curled up on the square's wet pavement and went to sleep. At sunrise, as Lewis awoke, he found dozens of amused Chinese demonstrators taking pictures of him.

For the U.S. journalists who have spent the past three weeks covering the historic protest in Tiananmen Square, the mixture of curiosity, awe and fascination was mutual. "Long ago, when I dreamed of being a reporter," said CBS EVENING NEWS anchor Dan Rather last week, "this is the sort of story I dreamed of covering." Aside from its inherent drama, the China story is special because it has thrust the journalists themselves onto center stage. Aware that the eyes of the world were upon them, the students played to the TV cameras to voice their demands for freedom and democracy. Like the demonstrators, reporters have been operating under the constant threat of a crackdown. Meanwhile, the shifting working conditions imposed on them by the government became a weather vane of the power struggle going on behind the scenes.

First came the May 20 declaration of martial law, which restricted journalists from conducting interviews or taking photographs. It soon became apparent, however, that the rules were hardly being enforced. The Voice of America's Mandarin news broadcasts, the most credible source of information in the eyes of the demonstrators, were reportedly jammed, but only on some frequencies. Live TV transmissions by satellite were suspended and restored, then suspended again. As the possibility of live coverage came and went, videotaped reports flowed freely out of the country to satellite stations in Tokyo, Hong Kong and even Moscow. Entry into China proved surprisingly easy as journalistic reinforcements poured into Beijing from around the world. One 747 arriving late last week carried only 50 passengers, 40 of whom were newspeople.

By the time the latecomers arrived, the story was in a holding pattern. The previous week's images of hundreds of thousands of Tiananmen demonstrators were no longer news. "The China story is beginning to elude us," said ABC's Ted Koppel in one of last week's most honest appraisals. "There appears to be a struggle for power at the highest level of government in China, but we cannot see it or measure it or describe it in any detail."

To fill the gap, CBS tried to recapture some of the drama of the preceding week. When China Central Television announced that it would be shutting off its satellite-transmission facility on Wednesday, CBS booked the last block of , time, hoping to recreate a scene similar to the one a few days earlier, when viewers saw Chinese officials ordering Rather off the air. Sure enough, that night's CBS EVENING NEWS showed Rather at his anchor desk in New York City, interviewing Beijing correspondent John Sheahan. When Sheahan's picture suddenly disappeared from the screen, Rather abruptly cut him off in midsentence, even though Sheahan's telephone connection remained intact. "We timed it so that if ((the satellite)) did get cut, it would happen during the report," admitted producer Lane Venardos.

With the importance of images fading, temporarily at least, there was little in the way of solid analysis. After declaring martial law on nationwide TV, Premier Li Peng was not seen in public for five days; Deng Xiaoping and party leader Zhao Ziyang, the other key players in the power struggle, remained out of sight even longer. During this period of uncertainty, solid information was the scarcest of commodities in China, and wild rumors abounded. There were even reports that Deng was fleeing into retirement in the U.S. Protesters in Shanghai, Xian and Lanzhou staged memorial services for Beijing hunger strikers, although none had died. "People are learning about major government changes and about the biggest student movement in China's history from Popsicle sellers and newspaper dealers," said Zhang Weiguo, a reporter on Shanghai's World Economic Herald. "This is not a way to inform the people."

With reporting by Jaime A. FlorCruz/Beijing and Gayle Ray/Atlanta