'Chinese Netizens...Are Fighting Back'

[shan]

China Accuses Western Media of Distorted Reporting on the Riots in Tibet

ABC NEWS

China isn't particularly known for prizing free speech.

But in the weeks since riots in Tibet broke out and Chinese troops clamped down on them, many Chinese have found their voice. It is loud, angry and aimed at us.

"Us" being Western journalists who have reported on the Tibet protests and the ensuing political fallout. ABC News' office in Beijing has received dozens of calls from all over China berating Western media's "biased" reports.

The backlash appears organized around an Internet propaganda campaign that some suggest the Chinese government is secretly feeding.

Since Friday, a new Web site called anti-cnn.com has been documenting what it sees as distorted foreign media coverage. CNN has been the focus of protest, even though CNN is not available in the vast majority of Chinese homes.

Bloggers were the first to point out that CNN.com was running an Agence France-Presse photo of a Chinese military vehicle that cropped out the Tibetan protesters throwing rocks at the vehicle.

The cropped photo, juxtaposed with the original photo, quickly spread through the Chinese blogosphere as supposed proof of the Western media bias.


Other photos on the Web site show reportedly misleading headlines and captions -- one dispatch describes a Chinese crackdown, but shows Nepalese or Indian troops beating protesters.

A German television station issued an apology for using pictures in the wrong context, and other Web sites have made changes to their captions.

And a front-page story on the English-language China Daily read "Chinese citizens … are fighting back to discredit often distorted, and sometimes dishonest, reports by Western media."

The Chinese are getting an inadvertent taste of the power of free speech to effect change. But how free is it?

A few days after the unrest, when global media attention was shining a bright spotlight on China's policies in Tibet, China's state-run television network, CCTV, aired a 15-minute documentary showing the Chinese version of the riots.

The documentary was wallpapered with footage of Tibetans rampaging through Lhasa and carried emotional interviews with Chinese who had lost loved ones, injured victims and distressed shopkeepers who had been looted.

This was the only version of events people in China saw. Even those who can understand English and might have been illegally receiving CNN or BBC would have seen their screens switch to black by government censors almost every time a report about Tibet was aired.


As Jamie Metzl, the executive vice president of the Asia Society, said in a phone interview, "While the Chinese government is trying to tell a story internally within China for Chinese consumption that tells only of the victimization of the ethnic Chinese in Tibet, that one-sided story isn't going to fly internationally and so China is going to need to show a greater sensitivity to both sides of this conflict."


And surprisingly, the accompanying conversations about ethnic tensions that would normally arise in a society after such ethnically charged riots have not occurred in China.

Instead, the State Council held a news conference today featuring Tibetan scholars, one of whom told incredulous reporters, "Relations between ethnic groups in Lhasa are extremely harmonious."


If China wonders why its version of what happened in Tibet is not wholly believed, perhaps it is because of statements like that, which undermine its overall credibility.

A Chinese caller to our office asked the other day, "Why do you people believe what the Dalai Lama says? Why don't you believe what China says?"

It's a simple question with a difficult answer. First, as journalists, we try to hear what all sides are saying and fashion what we believe to be the closest thing to the truth from that.

But how do you start a conversation when you're working with such different premises?

In China, the Dalai Lama is regularly portrayed as an illegitimate leader, a fraud, even a criminal. But in the rest of the world, the Tibetan spiritual leader is a respected Nobel Peace Prize winner on par with Mother Theresa for his humanitarianism. That is part of it. Perhaps both sides are biased. On the other hand, it somehow comes down to the powerful versus the oppressed. As my colleague pointed out, "The Dalai Lama doesn't have an army."

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FROM bbs of Chinadaily

Among western news media who covered the riots in Tibet earlier this month, the US-based Cable News Network (CNN) was a markable one for its serious distortion of  the truth and betrayal of basic journalistic ethics. The so-called western mainstream media organization posted a picture showing a bunch of people running in front of a  military vehicle on the street of Lhasa. However,  Chinese netizens found that the right side of the original picture, which was cropped out by CNN, shows some rioters throwing stones at the vehicle. The flying stones, burning motorcycles and insane mobsters throwing stones are still visible from the original picture.

But CNN editors just took it as nothing. They cut off the images that can fully reflect vicious faces of the rioters. Thus the implications of the picture published by CNN are just the opposite to the fact. Their reports aroused great indignation from netizens all around China. Angered by the distorted coverage, they united to hit back at what they called "a conspiracy", even with a slogan “Man should never act as low as CNN”!
The slogan looks unfriendly, but expresses the anger of Chinese netizens. A netizen said: “CNN had cropped the picture, cutting off the part showing rioters attacking military vehicles. This is distortion of facts and can mislead the readers. What’s the motive behind this?”  Another said:＂Chinese people can not neglect the evil ambitions behind this.”  “CNN’s hypocrisy and ugliness was fully exposed by this biased report,” wrote a netizen.
“The incident once again shows that: the western media are holding a biased attitude when reporting on China. They just ignored the facts and look at the actions of the Chinese government in an fragmented and arbitrary way. This may have something to do with their link to their respective governments. In addition, we can see from this incident that the so-called freedom of press advocated by western countries has underlying political motives. There is no ‘pure freedom of press‘ at all，” a netizen said.

Besides CNN, a number of other Western media also distorted the truth in covering the riots. On March 17, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) released a picture on its website showing Chinese riot police officers helping medical staff carry a wounded person into an ambulance. The caption on the website said “There is a heavy military presence in Lhasa”. British newspaper the Times uses words such as “military crackdown”, “violent control”, and “hundreds Tibetans were killed” in its coverage to distort the truth.
On Marth 18, the German newspaper Berlin Morgenpost posted a picture on its website in which police in Lhasa rescued a young man of Han nationality assaulted by rioters. But the caption distorted the fact as "insurrectionist taken away by police."
The American Fox TV said in a picture's caption on its website that the Chinese military dragged some protesters onto a vehicle, but actually the uniformed people were Indian police.
German news television N-TV used a picture and a video sequence taken in Nepal’s capital Kathmandu of Nepalese police arresting protestors in a report about the riots in Tibet.
A netizen commented: “Some western media have constantly denigrated China in their reports and created ‘news’ out of nothing.“
“The western media must have some hidden objectives in creating these distorted reports on the incident,” a Chinese wrote.
“Due to deep-rooted prejudice and different values, the self-esteemed ‘objective’ western media always cover news on China with bias and sometimes even prejudice,” said a netizen.
“How could western media call their reports completely ‘objective and justice’ when reporting on other countries’ interior affairs based on their own ideology and perspective?” a netizen noted.
It has been two weeks since the Tibet riots happened and lots of rioters have turned themselves in. However, Chinese people have not fully recovered from the aftershock of the CNN’s biased reports.
Chinese people, especially its vast number of netizens can not forget easily what the so-called western media’s ethic principles

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Overseas Chinese students hold banners and flags protesting the western media bias against China in reports on the recent Tibet riots in Nathan Phillips Square in downtown Toronto. According to a report from Global Times, overseas Chinese have protested peacefully in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary and Montreal in Canada, Munich and Brunswick in Germany, Auckland in New Zealand and Stockholm until April 2. [huanqiu.com]








cool !!!

[Polly]

What these skewed reports do is to show the Chinese indeed their government has been telling them the truth, the Western media are biased against us and have deep seated animosity and resentment against the Chinese.

These reports are fanning a new patriotism that is sparking off from the rise of the country. and for lack of a better word, forcing, the Chinese to relay around the government.

[shan]

 Everybody is responsible for the fate of his country.