Western media manhunt

The Beijing offices of CNN and The Times of London are at the receiving end of Chinese style Internet manhunts: angry netizens are posting hateful comments on various websites, with some going so far as to make death threats by phone.

CNN has been targeted primarily, it seems, because of the Chinese blogger postings currently collected at Anti-CNN.com and their own well-known brand name. The Times has been targeted after the newspaper published an editorial by Simon Barnes that starts thusly:

Is this the Genocide Olympics? There are already people claiming that this year’s Games, to be held in Beijing, are a rerun of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin – the Games that were a glorification of Hitler and Nazism; by extension a glorification of a genocidal regime.

The anger is misdirected. The Beijing-based journalists of CNN have no control over what the station does with their reporting, and the Beijing bureau’s reporting is not what has been criticized. The Beijing correspondent of The Times has no control over what the newspaper runs in its editorial columns.

While the anger on the part of young Chinese netizens is not being orchestrated by the Chinese government, the foreign ministry and XInhua are rather enjoying the whole affair. Yesterday there was a press briefing by Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang.

A Danwei source commented on Qin’s response when asked why CNN was not invited on the journalist junket to Tibet.

Qin said “CNN has paid special attention to the events in Lhasa and given the events special treatment.” I could tell he was smirking when he said it, and apparently the Xinhua transcriber could too because he put ‘special’ in quotation marks.”

The Xinhua transcript of Qin’s briefing is here.