There is nothing about cocktails here, so skip this post unless you are having trouble sleeping. . .

Following up on my earlier post on the Chinese protests in relation to Tibet, there have been some further developments in the whole Chinese protesters and Chinese online media saga. (more…)

Anyone who has been following the recent Tibet riots will be familiar with the story. Peaceful protests in Tibet somehow become violent riots. China closes Tibet to the foreign media and issues hard-line statements about “splittists” and the “Dalai Lama clique”. The Chinese media report the story by dutifully repeating the government line. The foreign media report the story using the limited information and material available to them from both the Chinese and Tibetan sides. Chinese citizens are unhappy with the foreign media’s reporting of the story (or more specifically they have a gripe with the “western media”). A series of several cropped and incorrectly captioned photos and segments of news footage assumes enormous importance as a demonstration of western media bias. This material becomes “proof” that the western media is attempting to “paint China black”. Chinese students around the world protest. Exciting days indeed!

Gentle readers, it was at that point that your good narrator became involved, with ironic and entertaining results. (more…)

I get so fed up with the abysmal quality of reporting on Taiwan. Your typical Taiwan story is generally barely researched and hugely biased. Dev Nadkarni (who seems to be a Journalism lecturer from Fiji) served up a recent example in the New Zealand Herald. You can read the story here.

I am sick of reading this garbage so on Friday I shot a letter off to the editor of the New Zealand Herald. (more…)

Sir Edmund Hillary died yesterday morning.

For the past 24 hours the New Zealand media has been full of tributes, summaries of his achievements, reactions from around the world, various miscellaneous interest stories. Some might call it overdone, but it isn’t like he’s done this before, so lets let the media go to town. If talk-back radio is anything to go by the interest is out there. Since he passed away there has been little else on the airwaves besides people ringing in and sharing stories and thoughts. OK, there has been a little bit of silly stuff (replacing Waitangi Day with Hillary Day can only seem a good idea if harmonious race relations bore you), but mostly it’s been a feel-good media fest.

So far the New Zealand Chinese media is a glaring exception though. (more…)