When Western Media Bias Hits Home

[AmericanErrorist]

During my working years, I began to question my belief in the Western media. My job required I host many business people from Western countries. For those who were visiting China for the first time, their reactions were always of amazement and confusion. The modernity was just one of the reasons. They were prepared to see people feeling oppressed and wanting to "flee" the country.

Instead they saw people who were happy and content, no fear on their faces. Many foreign immigration lawyers brought brochures for refugee applications and, when told they were unnecessary, shook their heads in disbelief. And when I told them that I was from another city in China and just worked in Shanghai, they said, "Oh really? I thought Chinese people were not free to move."

I told them all this had changed two decades ago. They didn't know because their media didn't portray China in this way. China is a Communist country and "in a Communist country, the government lies and people dies," said one of my Western visitors.

Maybe this was the way it used to be, and I used to believe it too. But living in a prospering and opening China, I began to doubt the overall negative tune of the Western media toward China. I didn't think they were lying about what they said happened in China, but where was the balance and fairness? Why didn't they tell people that most Chinese live happy lives?

My distrust of the Western media increased when the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade was bombed by the U.S. military in 1999. I saw totally different portrayals in the Chinese and Western media.

From my computer, I read the reports of the bombing - in which three Chinese journalists were killed - on CNN and MSNBC. I was so disgusted after reading the first few stories that I didn't bother to scroll down to the bottom of their Web sites. I couldn't understand why there were so few voices in the U.S. media questioning the U.S. military's excuse of having used "an outdated map" - a ridiculous notion for anyone with even a basic knowledge of the operations of the U.S. military, which keeps a constant and precise survey of the battlefield, updating their combat maps every few hours.

These U.S. news sites also called protestors who threw stones at U.S. consulates - but injured no one - "radical nationalists," and said U.S. residents in China faced threats against their lives when in fact their consulates and embassies were so strongly protected by the Chinese police. They shouted about Chinese journalists being arrested when such arrests were hard to prove, but kept their mouth shut about the killing of Chinese journalists in the Belgrade bombing. And few news agencies mentioned the Women and Children's Hospital of Belgrade had also been bombed.

http://english.ohmynews.com/ArticleView/article_view.asp?no=198231&rel_no=1

[cprise]

1. Amazing read..

Thanks!