As you know, Chen Guangcheng is rumored to be holed up in the American embassy in China and it’s become a media firestorm.
But the media’s been twisting itself into some crazy positions to avoid some facts that are pretty central to the story.
Chen is a human rights activist who has strongly protested the one-child policy, the forced abortions, and forced sterilizations that the government takes part in.
You’d have a hard time knowing that from reading the media.
I’ll just show my point in a pretty rough manner. If you type in Chen Guangcheng’s name into a Google News search you get 10,330 hits. But if you mention “abortion” along with his name you get just over 3,000 hits. That means that more than 2/3 of the reports are skirting what Guangcheng is protesting about and why he’s under what’s essentially house arrest in the first place. Don’t you think that’s a pretty major point in a story about a guy who just escaped.
But many in the media contort the story in such a manner as to avoid this fact. They call him a “dissident” or a “human rights activist” and leave it at that. Those might be true but we know what the media’s trying to avoid.
This way they can get back to talking about the things that really matter, like the Republican war on women.
