Protestors in Beijing? Where were main-stream US media?

August 28th, 2008 Richard Posted in citizen journalism | No Comments »

One of the very cool things about the Olympics this year was that so much was available on-line. For the first time, people could focus on sports they were particularly interested in, and watch events asynchronously.  The web coverage was a great success for NBC. (One very not-cool thing was that the streaming and coolest features only worked with Windows Siverlight Technologies, but, complaining about the technology would be a subject for another conversation.)

The coverage was very positive about the Chinese hosts, and all indications were that the Chinese people were very hospitable. However, what troubles me is that this coverage reflects positively on a government that does not allow free speech; something we take for granted in the U.S. In fact, a series of dramatic and creative protests were organized and carried out by Students for a Free Tibet during the Olympics. We may not know about these protests at all, if it weren’t for a group of citizen journalists who documented them with photos and video. Most of the protesters, and even those who documented the protests, were detained, and eventually deported. This seems like important news to me; given all the controversy surrounding George Bush attending the opening ceremonies. However, a search of Google news didn’t reveal any story from a major U.S. news source that covered these very important facts. The only thing I found was this from Reuters (but didn’t see where the story was picked up), and this from the UK Telegraph.

Luckily, the story was covered as it developed by the classic web site BoingBoing. I watched the story with great interest; especially when I found that my friend Brian Conley, who produces the show “Live in Baghdad” was one of those retained and eventually released. The most recent BoingBoing  post was especially interesting to me because my very good friends Jay Dedman and Ryanne Hodson (who visited us just a few months ago) were interviewed from a hostel in Beijing, as they were on there way out of the country, fearing arrest. Jay and Ryanne describe the nature of the Chinese government’s response to quickly silence any form of protest.