Word: press
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...cannot report, says Shawn McHale, a professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University who is in Vietnam on a Fulbright-Hays fellowship. Vietnam's economy has been growing rapidly for the last several years as the authoritarian government gradually embraces free-market reforms. Institutions like the press would like to see a similar lifting of controls and have increasingly been pushing the limits of government tolerance...
...source of friction between the press and the powerful has been Hanoi's drive to root out rampant corruption among government officials. A scandal started brewing in early 2006 with the arrest of Bui Tien Dung, the former director of PMU18, a state road and bridge building division with a $2 billion annual budget that is largely funded by the World Bank and Japan. Dung and others were accused of embezzling millions of dollars, most of which was gambled away on European football matches, and spent on prostitutes and luxury cars, according to government investigators...
...while the Vietnamese press has enjoyed greater freedom of late, "The question is, how high up can you go?" says McHale. Apparently, not that high. Displeased with the coverage during the scandal, then-Prime Minister Phan Van Khai in 2006 called for news outlets to be prosecuted for "going too far." And today, many see the hand of a higher power in the recent acquittal of the country's deputy transport minister, the highest-ranking official charged in the Dung investigation, as well as in the arrest of the two reporters who wrote about...
That's not to say the press is blameless. Several senior journalists have raised questions about the ethics and reporting standards of Vietnam's fledgling media. Veteran journalist Huy Duc condemned the arrest of his colleagues, but also noted in his popular blog that the careers of at least two officials in the Communist Party were damaged because of unfounded allegations raised by the press in their PMU18 coverage. "A lot of information printed in newspapers at the time had been made up," Duc claimed, adding that reporters were used by party sources to destroy their political opponents. Duc blamed...
...McHale calls corruption a "cancer" that threatens to eat away at the country's economic gains. "Billions of dollars of FDI (foreign direct investment) is going to go away" if the problem is not attacked and corrupt officials remain unexposed, McHale says. "There is an interest in having a press that addresses these issues...