What If There Was An Anti-Gov't Protest In China And No One Showed Up? Would Press Reports Use Other Photos?

There has been some talk about how China is quite afraid of how the various anti-government protests in the Middle East might lead folks in China to try the same thing. In fact, there apparently had been something of a push outside the country to get Chinese citizens to participate in their own sort of "Jasmine Revolution," but at the time the whole thing was supposed to go down, apparently the only people who showed up were a ton of police and a whole lot of reporters. No actual protesters, though. Without protesters to bully, the police went after some reporters, but that was about it.

However, Glyn Moody points us to a report noting that despite this being a near total non-event, it appears some publications around the world used photos from other events with their own news coverage to imply that they were actually from the "protests" in China. Here are a few examples, though there are a bunch more at the link. I was unable to confirm much of this, since I speak almost no Mandarin, and read even less (i.e., none) so if there are more details please feel free to let us know in the comments: This one apparently comes from the news site "Online USA News" (sounds credible, huh?), but the image comes from a demonstration in Beijing in 2005, found via a Baidu photo identification tool. This photo is apparently of a prisoner sentenced to the death penalty in Beijing and has nothing to do with any protests The photo here is apparently from a job fair, as the signs say "seeking workers" and "hiring people," and have nothing to do with protests, though apparently the story is about the so-called protests. This story and image, from the Independent, in Ireland, is using a photo of police from an anti-Japanese demonstration in Lanzhou city from last year, again having nothing to do with this particular story. This image, used in a Norwegian story is apparently a photo of a political rally in Taiwan (the green signs apparently say Taiwan on them), rather than anything having to do with the non-existent "Jasmine Revolution" in China.

As mentioned, the link above has many more examples of this from a variety of other publications. The whole thing is pretty odd. Why would these publications bother putting up photos that have nothing to do with the event in question?

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Source: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110228/01352713300/what-if-there-was-anti-govt-protest-china-no-one-showed-up-would-press-reports-use-other-photos.shtml

COMPAL ELECTRONICS COSMOTE MOBILE TELECOM DLINK DIGITAL CHINA HOLDINGS