Journalists in the Philippines expressed outrage after Chinese officials accused them of manipulating videos to make Manila appear as the victim.
Knewz.com has learned that the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines (FCOP) “took deep offense to the insinuation that the press is a ‘troublemaker’ in cahoots with the government to forward a political agenda.”
The association was responding to a post on X from Hua Chunying, the Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs for China, that said, “Each time the Philippines delivered supplies to the grounded warship, they had many journalists with them on board, and had the manipulate the videos they recorded to make sensational news and project the Philippines as a victim.”
The FCOP said the comments were an “insult to the integrity of journalism and an alarming attempt to muzzle an independent press.”
Hua was referring to the true fact that the Philippines has started to take journalists on boats when it resupplies the Sierra Madre, a military ship on Second Thomas Shoal that Manila deliberately grounded to act as a lookout point.
Manila also uses the boat as a physical marker of its territory to try to prevent China from claiming more territory in the South China Sea. Beijing illegally claims the entirety of the region as its own, leveraging a nine-dash line found on a 1947 map to make the assertation.
As a result, Filipino and Chinese boats constantly clash in the region because the territory crosses into Manila’s globally recognized 200-mile exclusive economic zone.
The Philippines started taking reporters with them on resupply missions because they claimed they were being consistently harassed during the resupply missions, and they wanted to be able to provide proof, especially when they accused Chinese ships of firing water cannons at them.
They have done precisely that, and a series of videos and images published in 2024 have brought international attention to the consistent conflict between Filipino and Chinese boats in the area.
The FCOP acknowledged the embedded missions but said in a statement that “a free and independent press does not what they are told, but what they observe, framed by historical and political context.”
It added that the footage is coming from multiple media outlets, lowering the likelihood of coordinated manipulation, and it is vetted by a variety of sources. The FCOP said that the work “speaks for itself.”
“FCOP will not be intimidated by threats and groundless attempts to smear its members’ reputation. We will continue to courageously cover developments and the impact of events in the South China Sea and across the region,” said the association.
The comments from Hua came from a series of tweets called “five things to know about the China-Philippines South China Sea dispute.”
In the tweets, Hua repeated Beijing’s claims that the Spratly Islands and Second Thomas Shoal are its “undisputed” territory. She then said that a 2015 Hague ruling that declared the territory claims illegal was a “misapplication of the law.”
Hua said that Manila had reneged on its 1999 promise to remove the Sierra Madre from the Second Thomas Shoal, which is technically accurate but was a commitment made long before tensions ramped up.
After attacking the Philippines press, Hua argued that the entire issue was because the U.S. was provoking trouble and “trying to set regional countries against China.”