Earthquake testing traditional censorship

from Wikipedia

The Sichuan earthquake has been testing the censorship systems in rather unprecedented ways. New technologies not only made it possible for Chinese citizens to get in touch with their loved ones, reports from the disaster zone came in already minutes after the earth stroke. Earlier disasters and fast moving events have already shown that keeping events under the carpet is not longer an option. Spindoctors might still have a chance to play their games, but the audiences are deciding whether they believe it or not.
Traditional media have been using that growing freedom to push the envelope and the Sichuan earthquake has been a great opportunity to do so again, writes for example the New York Times:

Two and a half hours after a huge earthquake struck Sichuan Province on Monday, an order went out from the powerful Central Propaganda Department to newspapers throughout China. “No media is allowed to send reporters to the disaster zone,” it read, according to Chinese journalists who are familiar with it.
When the order arrived, many reporters were already waiting at a Shanghai airport for a flight to Sichuan’s provincial capital, Chengdu. A few were immediately recalled by their editors, but two reporters from the Shanghai newspaper The Oriental Morning Post, Yu Song and Wang Juliang, boarded a plane anyway. Soon, they were reporting from the heart of the disaster zone.

The paper has not a very huge readership, so relied on a kind of stunting in the Chinese media climate, a stunt that was followed soon by journalists of other media who initially had returned to their desks. The CPD had to allow more freedom in reporting.