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.
May 2, 2012 at 4:16 am
When I watched CNN this morning (it's become my ritual. I am one of the only 100,000 people who actually watch Starting Point, because Soledad O'Brien's ratings suck), they actually mentioned his protesting of forced abortions with at least almost every other sentence. Maybe the libs had some coffee and realized what they were doing.
May 2, 2012 at 2:11 pm
Maybe Brett, but an article a couple days ago in the NYTimes didn't mention his anti-forced abortion activitism until perhaps the 6th paragraph. Even more telling was the "com box" wherein a weighty amount of posters general reaction was one of "this one guy is going to mess up the Pres's opportunity to kiss-kiss China's red derierre" — but in liberalspeak. Not exactly their reaction when Ai Weiwei was held in house arrest.
May 2, 2012 at 5:32 pm
If anyone tuned into NPR's Ashbrook and On Point yesterday (my hour-long commute through radio wasteland offers little else – and its inanity keeps me awake better than coffee) you will have heard him asking some wonk about this poor fellow, getting into his windup with a canard, Biden-style, of understanding the Chinese position – if you have that many people, it's kind of understandable why you would want to have a one-child policy (he never mentioned the forced abortions except as "being on the wrong side of that policy" whatever that means.). This question, coming about 35 minutes into the program, by the way, was the FIRST mention of what Mr. Guangcheng was protesting in the first place.
I have to hand it to Ashbrook, though – at least he's courageous enough to give voice to what most liberals are experiencing – policy envy. Who doesn't think liberals would LOVE – absolutely LOVE – to impose a one-child policy here in the US?
Think that's overreaching? Fine. Then the HHS mandate is merely a harmless suggestion.
JOB