When two world leaders were caught on a hot mic having a bizarre conversation about living forever, the news agency Reuters realized it was a big story.
Reuters reported on and aired the footage of Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping discussing organ transplantation as a means of life extension and perhaps immortality during a September 3 Victory Day Parade in China, a procession celebrating the end of the Second Sino-Japanese War.
But two days later, Reuters yanked the video off its website, retracted the footage from its wire service, and erased clips from its social media feeds.
The reason: a takedown letter from a China Central Television, China’s state-controlled television network, which had licensed footage of the event to Reuters.
Last Friday, CCTV lawyer HE Danning wrote to Reuters demanding the video be taken down. “The editorial treatment applied to this material has resulted in a clear misrepresentation of the facts and statements contained within the licensed feed.”
Reuters, whose parent company Thomson Reuters conducts a variety of business operations in China, complied.
“Reuters removed the video from its website and issued a ‘kill’ order to its clients on Friday,” the media company wrote in a statement published on its website, explaining its decision to withdraw the footage from a portal used by other news organizations that rely on Reuters as a wire service.
The initial Reuters article about the hot mic moment now contains a note that “story has been corrected to withdraw videos, with no changes to text.”
Reuters didn’t just remove the full four-minute event video from its systems, but also a 38-second annotated clip of the exchange that it had previously posted across its social media platforms, including TikTok, Facebook, and LinkedIn. A Reuters World News podcast episode, which features a short audio clip of the exchange, is still online.
Footage of the event remains online elsewhere — but not all clips capture the conversation between Xi and Putin as clearly as the Reuters recording. A version of the event footage on CCTV’s official YouTube channel includes audio of an announcer speaking and music playing, obscuring the conversation about life extension between Xi and Putin.
In the version of the video Reuters posted to TikTok (and later deleted), Xi and Putin stroll around like old chums as they discuss, through translators, “immortality in a conversation caught on a hot mic,” as Reuters summarized in the opening title card.
During the conversation, as seen in the Reuters clip, Xi says: “In the past people rarely lived longer than 70 years, but today they say that at 70 you are still a child.”
“Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become and even achieve immortality.”
The Russian state-funded outlet RT later posted Bloomberg’s version of the video, which remains online and features a similar translation of Xi’s remarks over the same 38-second sequence, which Bloomberg credits to CCTV’s “live transmission” of the parade; RT’s thread also featured an English-dubbed video of Putin confirming the exchange at a press conference.
Putin responds, “Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become and even achieve immortality.” Xi then says, “Some predict this century humans may live up to 150 years old.”
In a statement, Reuters expressed that they “stand by the accuracy of what we published” and that “we have carefully reviewed the published footage, and we have found no reason to believe Reuters longstanding commitment to accurate, unbiased journalism has been compromised.”
“Reuters withdrew these videos because it no longer held the legal permission to publish this copyrighted material, and as a global news agency, we are committed to respecting the intellectual property rights of others,” Reuters spokesperson Heather Carpenter told The Intercept.
Thomson Reuters, headquartered in Toronto, engages in an assortment of business ventures in China, such as an AI-based legal “co-counsel” bot, “global trade solutions,” and legal research on Chinese law through its Westlaw product. The company maintains several offices in China, including in Shanghai, Beijing, and a Reuters news bureau in Shenzhen. The news organization is currently hiring for a researcher position at its Beijing bureau.
Reuters did not respond specifically when asked if its business interests played any interest in complying with the removal request.
This isn’t the first time Reuters has taken down content at the behest of international authorities. In 2023, Reuters published an exposé about the Indian cyber-espionage firm Appin. An Indian court deemed the article to be “indicative of defamation” and ordered that the article be removed. As the Freedom of the Press Foundation highlighted, even though Indian courts don’t have jurisdiction outside of India, Reuters removed the article not just in India but also worldwide. Once the injunction expired, Reuters reinstated the article.
The Chinese government has in the past blocked Reuters news websites on occasion for unspecified reasons.
Seth Stern, director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation, said Reuters’ decision to remove the video is a blow to press freedom at a critical juncture.
“International news outlets have a responsibility to uphold press rights internationally, especially in times like these where press freedom is backsliding almost everywhere. Otherwise, journalism’s independence sinks to the lowest common denominator whenever news of global importance breaks in a country governed by a repressive regime.”
He cautioned that compliance with takedown requests is a slippery slope.
“What makes [Reuters] think the next censorial regime that might not like what it prints isn’t taking notes?” he asked.
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