Olympics

During the war in Vietnam, the daily press briefings by the American military were called the “Five o’clock Follies” by the foreign press corps that was on the receiving end of the military’s damage control aimed at controlling the story from Vietnam. The Beijing Games have their own daily press meeting, at 10 am, hosted…

NBC coverage of the women’s gymnastics team competition made incessant mention of the controversy over the Chinese athletes’ ages. Are they really 16, or are they underage? And what does that say about the awful and efficient “machine” that pumps out China’s Olympians? NBC announcers made sure that American viewers pondered the matter as the gold medal went to…

Kristin Jones has been doing a great job monitoring the Chinese media and the more unofficial online world. One of the realities she has pointed out is the similarity of coverage across China’s media when sensitive issues crop up. There is a reason for that. An interesting piece, “Screws tighten on mainland journalists,” ran in…

Bloggers in China know that certain words are easily picked out by censors’ keyword searches. So they don’t use them, and their posts stay up longer. But images are harder to detect, particularly if they aren’t labeled.Today, somebody calling himself Qian Tiexian started a thread at the blog aggregator Bullog with the title “Two children.”…

British journalist John Ray speaks about his arrest by Chinese officials while covering a protest  for a free Tibet in Beijing. Also, for additional video footage of Ray being arrested by Chinese officials, visit the BBC Web site.

Before I bury them below today’s lengthy post, here are two quick items. If you are stuck behind someone’s filtering system, in China or anywhere else in the world, check out citizenlab’s guidebook in pdf. It tells you how to circumvent the restrictions. And today the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China updated its list of…

Despite reports of censorship, several Chinese newspapers have reported on the stabbing death in Beijing on Saturday of a relative of the U.S. men’s volleyball coach. But most of the reporting has been limited to official statements. Emphasizing that the attacker acted alone, Beijing Youth Daily yesterday quoted Beijing Olympic Committee official Wang Wei in identifying the victim…

Is this Web site, www.cpj.org, blocked in China? The answer is yes, although there are a few holes in the firewall. Being blocked means that China is not following through on its pledge of complete media freedom for the Games. It also means we are being heard by the government and our criticisms are hitting…

Major news coverage in China and elsewhere is naturally devoted to the Games themselves. Two Chinese weightlifters and the Chinese men’s synchronized divers won gold medals today. Yesterday’s news of 17 synchronized attacks with homemade explosives in the western region of Xinjiang received little coverage in or out of China. The exception once again was Caijing, a financial news…

In an earlier post, I mentioned that the government is taking an aggressive stance on covering news–to grab control of a story before others break it–especially when it involves “difficult” events such as the attacks in Xinjiang province.