Look, I care a lot for China, I love the country, its people and their culture, and I wish the Chinese all the best on their way to an open society. But I’m not a big fan of us westerners patronizing them from some kind of know-it-all attitude, especially when we’ve got problems even to discern the family and given names of the Chinese that we talk and write about.

Here, in my blog posting above, I’m more concerned with the state of our domestic media. We have the privilege to live in a democracy with a free press. It’s not only a privilege, it’s also a competitive advantage. We should make responsible use of that.

Sure. But it is a good explanation of bad and biased journalism.

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/4963/

From the tenor of the reporting coming from the bleating press, it sounds like the men in blue are beating protestors to death on the streets. All they are, is a foreign police security detail, which is actually routine even for sports events.

The entire issue is just retarded. China could be handing out candies to cute little babies and the headlines would read “Inscrutible Chicoms give candy to babies. Insidious plot to give children gum disease, cavities, gingivitis says activists!”

@another mick: Of course it could be a matter of dispute whether or under which conditions it is prudent to allow foreign security forces into your country. But if it is not okay in this case, it’s the local government which is to blame.

If on the other hand you instead focus on the security guards and portrait them as robots and brutes, even though they were just trying to secure the torch relay procedure in an extremely hostile environment (would you really have sent volunteers into such a situation?), and while actually all the really tough response to the protesters’ actions has been done by local european police force and not by them, your journalistic intention might quite legitimately be questioned.

(BTW, are European policemen not trained to kill “if necessary”? I wouldn’t feel particularly secure were they not. Does Spon mention this of the British and French policemen? Why not?)

So, it’s mostly the focus and style of the report and it’s context of smear journalism (like just now again, when the word “perfidious” makes it into an editorial teaser about China) that is the target of my criticism.

Believe me, I have no sympathy for police state methods (or censorship, for that matter). But the fact that China still has a serious human rights problem in many areas is no excuse for bad and biased journalism.