China intends to root out a "disease" it says is plaguing the nation's news industry: extortion and so-called fake news.

According to the People's Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Communist Party, such a phenomenon "seriously damages the image of news workers, corrodes the credibility and authoritative nature of the news media, is strongly opposed by all sectors of society, and bitterly detested by the people." Nine government departments will be involved in the crackdown on such activity, the newspaper said.

By extortion, the government was referring to the practice in which people presenting themselves as journalists—real or not—threaten to report negative information on sources unless they pay them. While it didn't explicitly spell out what it meant by "fake news," the government has in recent years been cracking down on the dissemination of rumors or thinly sourced reports that it says contribute to social instability.

As David Bandurski of the University of Hong Kong's China Media Project puts it, the phenomenon of extortion is a "massive problem that's only gotten worse," particularly as smaller print outlets increasingly struggle to compete against social media platforms such as Sina Weibo and WeChat.

Late last year, in one particularly high-profile case, a Chinese newspaper journalist confessed to accepting hundreds of thousands of yuan in exchange for producing stories defaming a large construction-equipment maker. (Chinese reporters routinely accept hongbao, or small packets of money, when attending press events.) Meanwhile, deal-cutting among IPO candidates faced with media extortionists—in which many companies pay for advertisement space to avoid negative coverage—is common, according Caixin Magazine.

China Real Time has spoken privately with a handful of former "fake reporters" who say the phenomenon is widespread, providing easy work for low-skilled graduates.

Still, China's purges of so-called "fake news" have also at times been motivated along apparently political lines. As the China Media Project has documented, when publications, including CPPCC News and Youth Times, published 2009 reports referencing the concentration of China's wealth among top business leaders and government officials, they were roundly censured, despite accurately citing the official who'd made the statements.

"It's kind of a no-brainer, it's total hypocrisy," Mr. Bandurski said of this week's announcement, citing the fact that the Central Propaganda Department, which regularly bans media from reporting on certain topics, will be among the government agencies participating in the fake news crackdown.

China's public officials want to "maintain public opinion control in order to maintain social and political stability," he said.

For those minds inquiring, the People's Daily report made no mention of any crackdown on another kind of notorious "fake reporter" in China—the ones carefully chosen as audience plants in official briefings.

--WSJ Staff