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,........

© The Intercept