Just got this message from the American consulate in Shenyang:
Any large-scale public event such as the upcoming Olympic Games may present an attractive target for terrorists. There is a heightened risk that extremist groups will conduct terrorist acts within China in the near future. In light of these security concerns, U.S. citizens traveling in China are advised to use caution and to be alert to their surroundings at all times, including at hotels, in restaurants, on public transportation and where there are demonstrations and other large-scale public gatherings. Consistent with our standard advice, American citizens are urged to avoid the areas of demonstrations.
In accordance with these security concerns, Chinese authorities have increased security in China’s airports during recent months. For example, Chinese airport authorities recently implemented tighter restrictions on taking liquids, aerosols, or gels aboard flights in carry-on baggage. Such restrictions may apply to food, cosmetics, toiletries and medicine. Travelers should contact their air carrier before their flight to determine the precise regulation in place.
American citizens are strongly encouraged to maintain a high level of vigilance, be aware of local events, and take the appropriate steps to bolster their personal security. For additional information, please refer to “A Safe Trip Abroad found at travel.state.gov.
Stephen Hadley is the National Security Adviser to President George W. Bush. He was Condoleeza Rice’s number two in Bush’s first term, before Rice moved to State.
Think what you want about China’s policy out west, where dissidents have clashed with police over religious freedom and national identity, where history can be confusing and complicated and politics even more so.
Just make sure you know what country you’re thinking about.
Hadley said two days later he favors “quiet diplomacy” with China. The Australian quotes him saying:
“If other countries are concerned about Tibet, they ought to do what we are doing through quiet diplomacy - send the message clearly to the Chinese that this is an opportunity with the whole world watching, to show they take into account and are determined to treat their citizens with dignity and respect. They would put pressure on the authorities quietly to meet with representatives of the Dalai Lama and use this as an opportunity to help resolve that situation.”
One has to wonder, just how quiet is this diplomacy?
George Stephanopoulos did western media no favors, either. Maybe he knows where Nepal is, but he didn’t show any sign of it, any more than Hadley.
People are already asking whether Western media gets China. I’m starting to wonder, does anybody know what’s going on? Anybody? Bueller?
“Do you feel western media is misinformed about China? If so, what source of information do you rely on when it comes to staying informed on China?”
Plenty of Chinese think so. A Sina.com petition has garnered 1.19 million protest signatures alleging, “Western media organisations such as CNN and BBC have churned out untrue and distorted reports of the event,” according to AFP (via CDT). China Daily chimes in with an editorial: Media must be objective.”
“If you go on acting like CNN, get out of China. Chinese people do not welcome you,†[the fax to Johnson's office] concluded. The writer signed off simply as “a Chinese person.”
Only one foreign journalist was actually in Lhasa when the riots broke out, James Miles of the Economist. He told the China Beat this:
The foreign media were almost entirely absent from Lhasa (a couple may have sneaked in under cover after the riots broke out but would have had limited access). Yet I have seen some very good reporting on what happened, notwithstanding the Chinese media’s nitpicking. Reporting in the official press, by contrast, while reasonably on the mark as far as the violence goes, has been highly misleading by failing to look at the bigger picture of unrest in Tibet and beyond, by not asking what might have caused this anger and by portraying this as the actions of a handful of people organised by the Dalai Lama’s “clique.” It wasn’t a handful, and I saw no evidence to suggest anything other than spontaneity.
Richard Spencer, from the Daily Telegraph, makes a similar point.
But explicitly - and in this they represent reality - government spokesmen do not want us to be “balanced”, and nor can we. We do of course quote government spokesmen, like Mr Zhang - and it makes them look absurd. But more than that, to “give both sides” means doing so with a level of engagement which the Chinese side is clearly determined not to allow. We cannot engage with the claims and counter-claims, often contradictory, coming out of officials and the state media.
A release through Xinhua says a policeman somewhere has been killed by rioters. We report this. But how easy is it coherently to quiz anyone about how, why and when this occurred? Will an eye-witness account be given? Will an honest assessment of injuries on both sides be given? When we ask, in what direction were the retaliatory shots fired, who was running where, do we get a response? There is no-one to give one. Phones are hung up. Spokesmen churn out one-liners, platitudes and what my old assistant used to call “nonsense-speak” which no-one believes. The government would rather not give us a narrative than give us one that we can pick at.
The pro-Tibet people, on the other hand, do answer their telephones (both the campaigns and the government). They engage in questioning. They differentiate between the claims of which they are certain, the claims they attribute to eye-witness reports, and the claims they say are second-hand and unverified. They seek to make what they say coherent and comprehensible.
They may not always be right, and to be sure they have an agenda, but the attempt to make sense at least wins some of our sympathy (though a surprising number of journalists remain suspicious of them).
Here’s my take: There isn’t nearly enough news coming out of China. What we get on this side of the Pacific is incomplete, often anecdotal, and for the most part written for an audience with little background on China.
The answer here is more news, more information, more voices. If China—its government and its people—want truly fair, factual reporting, the door is theirs to open.
For the past few days now, I’ve been trying to figure out what to say about Tibet. There isn’t much I can add, really. I’ve never been there, and what is worth saying has largely been said by people closer to the situation more knowledgeable about the complexities involved.
So I’ve been reading, and because the internet is social, I’ve been posting links to news from Western China on Twitter, Google, Del.icio.us and Facebook. I’ve compiled those links into one RSS feed, which should be available within mainland China, where the news sites themselves are blocked.
I can’t help feeling a twinge of regret at not being in China right now. But being in America has its advantages. Namely, I don’t need a proxy to get my news. And realistically, Dalian is not meaningfully closer to Tibet than California. I can probably get more information here than I could there, or at least I can get it faster.
Hopefully, the links I’ve posted will be useful for anyone trying to keep up with the news. As much as anyone who’s been in China a month knows how to get around the Great Firewall, it’s also true that searching for news using proxies can be mind-numbingly slow and endlessly frustrating. That’s what the Firewall does: It makes it just difficult enough that casual browsers will go someplace more harmonious.
About three paragraphs into the story I was writing on a the homecoming party for a squad of local Marines, my editor popped her head around the cubicle with a suggestion:
“Do you think you could take out the drinking and the swearing?” she asked. We were, she reminded me, a family newspaper. (Note: It’s been a couple years since I worked there.)
I’ve never figured out what that means, exactly, a “family newspaper.” We printed some grisly stuff: car and train wrecks, blood stains on sidewalk, skeletons of houses gutted by fire.
And marines are vulgar. Take away the drinking, swearing, crude talk of sex and how it relates to consuming a Jello-shot, and you have something more bland, less real. (My marine friends call this the Army). These men had just come back from their second tour in Iraq. Foul language was the least of their issues.
Pat Thornton sent me on this nostalgia trip with his post this morning, noting that Stars & Stripes grapples with the same issue:
My paper is willing to print “shit†in a story but only in certain editions. Our Mideast edition is keeping the word, while our editions in Europe and the Pacific are dropping it. The Web will not feature the word as well.
…
The expletive was left in the Mideast edition because it’s a theater of war. The feeling was that troops in combat have a different community standard than those living on base with their families.
As much as it is our job, as journalists, to promote civic and civil debate, to calm the passions of our readers with facts and with reason, to enlighten, we’re also in the business of saying it like it is.
China wouldn’t be my first guess of places American lawmakers would look for legislative ideas. But Mashable points to a proposed law in Kentucky that would make it illegal for websites to allow anonymous comments and fine site owners $500 for the first offense. Tim Couch, the state representative who sponsored the bill, says it’s necessary to fight “online bullying,” according to WTVQ in Lexington.
The bill would require anyone who contributes to a website to register their real name, address and e-mail address with that site.
Their full name would be used anytime a comment is posted.
If the bill becomes law, the website operator would have to pay if someone was allowed to post anonymously on their site. The fine would be five-hundred dollars for a first offense and one-thousand dollars for each offense after that.
Sounds familiar, no? Couch’s reasoning is different, but this sounds awfully familiar to China’s old Real Name Registration rule for bloggers.
China, at least, could get away with trying blunt-instrument regulation of online speech. But Kentucky? Bit of a problem with the First Amendment there. Not to mention the problem of enforcing such a rule. As Mashable notes, much of this stems from suicides supposedly linked to MySpace, which is starting to sound like a newer and less bat-hungry version of Ozzy Osbourne.
This time around, in response to recent suicides on MySpace and other events taking place online that resulted supposedly from online, US lawmakers are willing to suspend the right to speak freely to apply a bandaid to the problems of American young ones’ self esteem. Understandably, when the irresponsible actions of a few lead to the death of a family member, immediate and decisive action is wanted to rectify the issue legally. Unfortunately, banning all anonymous commentary online is about like banning all gossip publications because Britney Spears became a bad mother due to overzealous paparazzi, or banning everything from pocket knives to nuclear arms because someone was mugged at the corner store.
As I mentioned, this debate has happened already. China toyed with it, then gave up. Maybe Couch would benefit from revisiting what Wang Xiaofeng wrote two years ago:
Insults and swearing did not start because of the Internet or blogs; libel started when people first started writing. Fraud and confidence tricks are ancient crimes, you can’t just blame them on the Internet. Is it possible that the real name system will solve all these problems? It’s like that old joke: if the eighth steamed bun is the one that makes you full, why bother eating the first seven?
You knew that, but it’s time we told you again. Death, disease, poverty that defies definition. It’s an old storyline. Sure, sometimes we need to be reminded how bleak things are, but at times, I find myself screaming at such a story: “SO WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT THIS?”
Like today, though it really wasn’t about Africa.
Editor & Publisher added up circulation losses at newspapers across the country, finding, without much surprise, things are bad.
In just four years the top newspapers in the U.S. have collectively lost about 1.4 million copies in daily circulation, E&P has found. But since the reported numbers come out every six months, the overall decline for individual papers may not hit home for many. Each fall off is usually in the low- to mid-single digits — but it sure adds up.
Fair enough. Good to know. So what do we do about it? I have a few thoughts.
Make this everyone’s issue.
I didn’t think much about the business side of newspapers in college. I hated it. That’s what business managers were for. But the business has changed, and now we all need to get in on the discussion. It’s not up to publishers, editors, Sam Zell or Stanford to save us.
Figure out what we’re doing right. Do more of it.
E&P leaves a big chunk out of this story. Hint: It starts with www. Much as we’ve lost in paper, we’ve gained in web audience. More, even. I’m not Polly Anna-ish about this, but we do need to understand where we can grow and make the most of it.
When in doubt, think small.
Quit your bitching and fix something, anything. Make your life easier. Stop worrying about macroeconomic trends forecasting an impending downturn in the likelihood of further streamlining in corporate structure. Go gather some data and graph it on Swivel. Shoot some video of how said data effects people’s lives and upload it to YouTube/Brightcove/Blip.tv. Publish it using an open-source CMS.
Look, the business model went and changed. The print edition isn’t what it used to be, I get it. But it’s time to stop whining and start building something worthy of all the nostalgia we keep throwing at ink on paper.
Sometimes it’s worth going back to basics, to remember what I thought I knew, just to make sure I didn’t forget it. Sometimes I find something important.
I was putting together a to-do list the other day for a columnist at a NorCal newspaper I’d like to work at. He wanted to get web savvy and I had a few suggestions I shared over a beer, and more I offered over email. The first of those was a this video, RSS in plain English.
I thought about that video again while I was in Berkeley last night, listening to several panelists talk about the need to “monetize the web.” How do we bring, and keep, more eyeballs on our pages as often and as long as possible?
But I think that’s the wrong approach, and I think it’s wrong because of what I told that columnist the other day:
Content can now go where readers are, and readers no longer have to, or expect to have to go find it.
Consider that thought in the context of this panel:
Everyone is talking about the future of the newsroom in this new digital world where young people get their news from YouTube and Facebook, and traditional print journalists have seen hundreds of their brethren laid off or bought out. Join us for a discussion of how these changes are affecting journalists. What can media workers’ unions do? Should journalists hurry up and learn how to blog and podcast before it’s too late?
With featured speakers:
Jeanne Carstensen, Salon.com Managing Editor
Louis Freedberg, California Media Project Director and San Francisco Chronicle former editorial writer
Luther Jackson, San Jose Newspaper Guild Executive Officer
Chris O’Brien, of the (possibly defunct) San Jose Mercury News Rethink project
Moderator Rob Gunnison called it “the best discussion of ‘I don’t know’” he’d heard in a long time. Somehow, that doesn’t give me much comfort.
Very little of the talk, in fact, left me with much confidence in the state of professional journalism in Northern California. Were panels like these my major source of inspiration, I’d be as depressed as my friends who went through that j-school and are now with me in the job hunt. Much of the dialog seemed to ask, “How do we do what we’ve been doing, what we’ve been telling ourselves for so long is so great, and now get people who don’t necessarily share that opinion to fund us?”
Plus some blogger bashing, talk of government or non-profit support and vilifying of Google and Yahoo.
O’Brien was by far the most impressive on stage. He brought up a reader survey asking where people went for information. Their answers:
“The way you live your life is that your most important source of information is your friends,” he explained. “Someone telling you what movie to go see is more important than Roger Ebert.”
Right, so, this is a delivery problem. Solutions, if I may:
Make your content easy to find. SEO the hell out of it. Redesign news organizations’ websites so they don’t make my eyeballs bleed.
Make your content easy to share. Add Share chicklets to stories. Offer RSS feeds. Keep links alive, permanently. Build Facebook apps.
These are small things. Incremental. Cheap. But how many newsrooms have done even this much? And of those that have, how many are in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area?
But the larger point may be something else O’Brien said:
People are very nervous about the idea of blowing up the newsroom. To a large degree, people in the newsroom, I’m not sure they really believe there’s a fundamental problem.
If we can’t make little changes, how do we make bigger ones?
Got this in an email from my old journalism teacher:
Anne Braden, and her husband Carl, fought for equal rights in a time and place where holding such ideas could get you killed. Both came close to that on a number of occasions. Anne died in 2006, and this short doc really gives a feel for who she was: unassuming, brave beyond measure, relentless in her pursuit of justice. Take a moment and remember or discover.
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