BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. In China, a bold and hugely successful tabloid has been slapped down by a government angered by its exposes. The crusading editor has sat in jail since spring awaiting charges, and two of his colleagues have been hit with 6 and 8 year prison sentences for what appear to be trumped up charges of corruption and bribery. Last year, the Southern Metropolis Daily ran a story that made journalistic history in China when it cast a bright light on old laws that allowed police abuses to go unchecked. But, since no good deed goes unpunished, the paper's top staff was. Philip P. Pan wrote about it last weekend for the Washington Post. He told us that Chinese journalism has been thrown into confusion by, of all things, the profit motive.

PHILIP P. PAN: All the newspapers in China are controlled by the Communist Party. The party decided about ten years ago that its newspapers needed to make money, forcing the newspapers and other media outlets to be responsible for their own profits and losses, to withdraw subsidies from these institutions. And so, you know, when they took these steps, these newspapers and, and television stations, they realized that in order to make money, they needed to produce journalism that people actually wanted to read instead of boring articles about Marxism and Communism.

BOB GARFIELD: And one of the great Cinderella stories was the Southern Metropolis Daily. Tell me about how it broke out -- what kind of stories it was doing.

PHILIP P. PAN: One of the first things it did that made a splash was the day Princess Diana died in, in Paris, it devoted a quarter of its pages to that story -- everybody else covered Princess Diana's story with only a few hundred words. It began publishing consumer sections, and they began becoming more aggressive about coverage of, of crime, of corruption, of social issues, and it was really a pioneer in local journalism. Other newspapers in China had attempted to attract readers with sort of this hard-hitting type journalism, but they always focused on stories and scandals that were occurring outside the local area. This newspaper, the Southern Metropolis Daily, took it a step further and began publishing tough stories about the community it was published in.

BOB GARFIELD: So let's get to the story that was published on April 25th, 2003.

PHILIP P. PAN: What happened was a college graduate who had come to Guong Zho to work as a graphic designer had left his apartment I think in the evening one night, and he was basically detained -- stopped on the street by police officers who asked to see his residency papers. He didn't have his temporary residence card with him, and he was taken to a detention center, and three or four days later he was beaten to death in the detention camp. His family suspected foul play; went to these reporters, and they were able to get an autopsy done, which concluded that it was a beating.

BOB GARFIELD: And more remarkable than the fact that they were able to get this story into print was what happened afterwards. The government changed the laws.

PHILIP P. PAN: It was quite amazing. Within two months, the government backed down and abolished these detention centers, and abolished the law that allowed police to detain people, almost at will, basically. And this had been a long-time goal of human rights activists. What had happened was, once this story was published, newspapers around the country picked it up, re-published it; it was posted on the internet, and tens of thousands of people wrote in on these websites just expressing their outrage at what happened to this college graduate. This happened just a few months after the new leadership in China took power, and at the time, it was seen as an attempt by the new leadership to demonstrate that they were a new generation, and they were going to do things differently. This came at the same time as the SARS crisis in China in which the press, after the cover-up was revealed, the press was allowed to report quite fully about the epidemic, and there was quite a bit of excitement that the new leadership was going to recognize the role of the press.

BOB GARFIELD: All right, this big scoop was 15 months ago. It was an optimistic moment, but now three principals of this newspaper are languishing in jail. What happened?

PHILIP P. PAN: Based on the people I've talked to, it, it seems that even though there are people in the party at the senior levels who appreciated what this newspaper had done, the local officials didn't appreciate it at all. This story that they published probably ended the career of many of the local Communist leaders there, and from what I understand, the local leaders were determined to find a way to punish this newspaper. Today, because there's such a division in the party itself about what the proper role of the press is, it's not easy for a local official to simply order a party newspaper to be shut down. He has to find an excuse; he has to find a reason.

BOB GARFIELD: And the, the crimes they are alleged to have committed had to do with the equivalent of expense account irregularities for very small sums of money.

PHILIP P. PAN: Part of this is the legacy of the fact that it's not really clear are these newspapers companies - are these newspapers government agencies -- it's not really clear what laws should apply to them. These newspapers felt that they were a company, and that they had the right to distribute funds as they saw fit. The courts that have convicted them have taken a different position -- that these newspapers are essentially government agencies, and they did not have approval to distribute the money that they did.

BOB GARFIELD: Is there any question in your mind or in anybody's mind for that matter that the arrests and prosecution of these men was retaliation for their journalistic exuberance, as opposed to just a coincidence?

PHILIP P. PAN: I think there's little doubt that what happened was simply retaliation. The amount of money involved in these cases is minimal compared to some of the major, big corruption cases that we have seen in China, and in many of these big-money corruption cases at least the officials and other people find themselves with very short prison terms, if any prison terms at all.

BOB GARFIELD: Considering the new enlightenment at the national level, is there any chance that national party leaders will intervene in this case?

PHILIP P. PAN: If I were going to put money on it, I think it's not going to happen unless there's a lot of international pressure. I think the jury is still out on whether this new leadership is truly enlightened or not; that decision that they made to abolish these detention camps and remove this law -- that was a step forward, but what we've seen here is a step backward.

BOB GARFIELD: All right, Philip. Well, thank you so much.

PHILIP P. PAN: Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: Philip P. Pan is the Washington Post bureau chief in Beijing.