2008 Tibetan Unrest - Media Coverage

Media Coverage

Initially, Chinese officials tried to contain information about the unrest and play down protests. According to The Guardian correspondent Tania Branigan, the government blocked foreign broadcasters and websites and denied journalists access to areas of unrest. Video sharing websites like YouTube, the entire The Guardian website, portions of the Yahoo! portal, and sections of The Times website had been restricted.

In European and US newspapers and TV, oppression of Tibetans was supposedly reported with inaccuracy and little independent cross-checking, according to the Chinese press. The Chinese newspaper, China Daily reported that there had been bias in the western media's coverage of the rioting in Tibet, including deliberate mispresentation of the situation. The newspaper pointed out Western media sources such as the Washington Post used pictures of baton-wielding Nepalese police in clashes with Tibetan protesters in Kathmandu, claiming that the officers were Chinese. The article stated that Chinese netizens across Beijing were angered by what they saw as "biased and sometimes dishonest" reporting by Western media. There was also criticism of CNN's use of a particular cropped picture. John Vause, who reported this story, responded to the criticism saying "...technically it was impossible to include the crashed car on the left", however CNN later replaced the image with one that was cropped differently. On March 24, 2008, the German TV news channel RTL disclosed that one photograph depicting rioters had been erroneously captioned. Separately, another German station, n-tv, admitted that it had mistakenly aired footage from Nepal during a story on Chinese riots. AFP further reported that Chinese students abroad had set up a website, namely Anti-CNN, to collect evidence of "one-sided and untrue" foreign reporting. Media companies accused of "falsified reporting" include CNN, Fox News Channel, the Times Online, Sky News, Spiegel Online and the BBC. Spiegel Online has rejected the accusations in an article. According to the New York Times, CNN apologized on May 18 over some comments made on April 9.

China's downplaying of the event soon ended. Riots against non-Tibetans began on Friday, March 14. Chinese TV channels aired hours of anti-Chinese riots in Lhasa and the aftermath. Employees at the state television service CCTV's English service were instructed to keep broadcasting footage of burned-out shops and Chinese wounded in attacks. As of March 18, 2008, no footages of demonstrators acting peacefully were shown. China's Communist Party newspaper, the People's Daily, called on the government to "resolutely crush the 'Tibet independence' forces' conspiracy and sabotaging activities". The People's Daily also accused the Dalai Lama and the Central Tibetan Administration of orchestrating the protests in its commentary. Yahoo! China have published "most wanted" poster across its homepage to help China police to catch 24 Tibetans. MSN! China has published the same list as well.

To counteract what the Chinese government called biased Western reporting on the crisis, foreign journalists were allowed to access the region again. Agence France-Presse (AFP) and Deutsche Welle (DW) reported that the Chinese government has allowed a small group of foreign journalists on a tour of Tibet. These reporters included those from the American Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Britain's Financial Times, Japan's Kyodo News Agency, KBS of South Korea, and Arab broadcaster Al-Jazeera. However, on March 27 in Lhasa, a riot by a group of monks from the Jokhang Monastery disrupted a media tour organised by Chinese authorities through Lhasa. The tour was the first opportunity given to selected foreign journalists to enter Tibet after the de facto ban on foreign reporters. The delegation was composed of journalists from the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, USA Today, the Arabic news station Al-Jazeera and the Associated Press. The journalists were selected by the Chinese authorities and were kept under close control while in Lhasa. The authorities blamed the limited number of journalists permitted to attend and the restrictions on their movement on logistical considerations. The Taiwanese media, who were also invited on the tour, reported that the monks told them that they had been locked down in the temple even though they had not participated in the riots and implored the foreign media to report the truth. The vice-chairman of the Tibetan Autonomous Region, Padma Choling, explained that they were locked down pending police interviews in relation to the riots, and that once interviewed they were released. He also promised that the monks involved in the protest would be "dealt with" according to law. The Tibetan activist group International Campaign for Tibet stated on March 28, 2008 that it feared for the welfare and whereabouts of the monks involved in the protest -- Sera Monastery, Drepung Monastery, Ganden Monastery and Ramoche Temple. The group did not explain why it identified four monasteries when the protest involved only monks from Jokhang. Choling later told reporters the monks would not be punished.

On March 17, 2008, The Toronto Star reported details from Canadians caught in the violent riots in Tibet. 19-year-old John Kenwood of Victoria, B.C. was witnessing a Chinese motorcyclist being pummelled unconscious by a Tibetan mob hurling chunks of pavement as big as bricks. "He may have died," Kenwood said last night (March 16). "I can't be certain." "He didn't seem to understand what was going on," said Kenwood. "He was wearing a gold helmet and he got off his bike and raised his arms. He didn't know what to do." Also the report cited Canadian eye-witnesses of how the riots turned violent and how some of them escaped with help from taxi drivers and guides. Another report described in detail how Canadian traveller Justin Winfield from Toronto helped to save a Han Chinese from mobs and took him to a local hospital along with two women.