DalianDalian.com

Christine Lu asks a worthwhile question:

“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.”

Meanwhile, Tim Johnson of McClatchy and Simon Elegant of Time report getting prank calls and threatening faxes.

“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.