The Anti-China Protests: When An Official Enemy Is Targeted, Media Take Notice

[Better Believe It]

FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting)
Extra! July/August 2008
Carrying a Torch for Anti-China Protests
When an official enemy is targeted, media take notice
By Julie Hollar

For once, mainstream media have found an anti-government protest to embrace. When the Olympic torch arrived in San Francisco on April 9 and thousands of demonstrators took to the streets to decry human rights abuses by the Chinese government, journalists descended on the scene like ants at a picnic.

CNN led the feeding frenzy. CNN’s torch protest coverage reveals an important lesson about protest coverage in general. Repression and violence in Tibet, Darfur and other areas under Chinese control or influence deserve much more media attention than they receive. But surely protests targeting a pre-emptive war launched by CNN viewers’ own government, either with the aim of preventing it from being launched or ending it after hundreds of thousands of lost lives and hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, would be significantly more newsworthy to an American audience than protests targeting the Chinese government’s actions.

There is one crucial difference between the protests: their targets. While the San Francisco protesters did hope to send a message to their own political representatives, the Chinese government was their ultimate target, and targeting China is firmly in the mainstream at a time when that country’s economic and political power is growing in the face of U.S. economic weakness. China certainly has far more critics among journalists’ favored sources and the pundit class than does the U.S. government in a time of war, making it a much more comfortable target of criticism for the media.

Those journalists also have biases of their own, and it was sometimes difficult to disentangle journalists’ backing for protesters from anti-China sentiment. Many made references to “Communist China” and some even drew starker parallels. Jeffrey Toobin, CNN’s legal analyst, argued:

Whether it was the Nazis in 1936 or the Chinese Communists in 2008, they are all using to promote their country. And if we want to take a stand against that kind of repression, not going to the opening ceremony is a very appropriate way of doing it. . . . It does say the United States government doesn’t approve of the Chinese government. And that seems like a very appropriate message to send right now.

Please read the entire article at:
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3581