Nongfu Spring, one of China's largest bottled water manufacturers, has filed suit against the Beijing Times for a series of reports earlier this year which questioned the safety of the company's products.
According to the Global Times, the company submitted a petition to the National Office Against Pornographic and Illegal Publications on Monday. The suit alleges that the Beijing Times "fabricated" opinions from national healthcare authorities to "attack" Nongfu Spring in an "apparently planned and organized" attempt to sway public opinion with a series of reports over the period April 7 to May 10.
The Beijing Times alleged that Nongfu Spring bottled water contained high amounts of arsenic and cadmium, and was lower in quality than tap water, a claim the company has argued is unsubstantiated. The report caused a dramatic drop in sales for Nongfu products.
Nongfu filed a civil suit against the paper in May, seeking 60 million yuan ($9.7 million) in damages. Spot checks carried out by health authorities in Hangzhou found that Nongfu products "met national mandatory standards for bottled drinking water."
The suit claims that the newspaper demonstrated "malicious intent" toward Nongfu Spring, though several other bottled water producers were criticised by the paper for following "Soviet-era" bottling standards.
Speaking to the Global Times, secretary of Nongfu Spring's board of directors Zhou Li admitted to being emboldened by the recent Zoomlion-New Express debacle.
Chen Yongzhou, a reporter for the Guangzhou-based New Express, was imprisoned by Changsha police after a report on financial problems at manufacturing giant Zoomlion. The newspaper issued a dramatic front page demand for its employee's release, but was forced to backtrack days later after Chen appeared on CCTV to "confess" to making false reports about Zoomlion in exchange for money.
Even the Global Times seemed shaken by the potential chilling effect if Nongfu Spring were to score a similar victory to Zoomlion's: "The Nongfu Spring case is not good for the media. Journalists should be very careful when blowing the lid on big companies and should collect solid evidence," Wang Sixin, a law professor with the Communication University of China, told the paper "However it's almost impossible for them to support every detail with facts. So journalists will have less space to do news reporting."
David Bandurski, of Hong Kong University's China Media Project, wrote regarding the Zoomlion case:
We can easily imagine the following totally hypothetical scenario: a listed company, stung by a series of reports from a commercial newspaper, pushes local authorities to arrest the reporter responsible; shamed again by a very public call for the reporter’s release, the company (and local authorities) seek out a program on state-run television, which agrees to air a forced confession by the reporter in exchange for a generous advertising purchase; the televised confession is a public relations coup for the listed company, turning the news narrative around and pushing its stock price higher.
[Image via Baidu]
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