Two German TV stations admitted today that they had mistakenly showed footages or photos of police crackdown of protestors in Nepal in their coverages of Tibetan violence. This is not getting reported here in the US at all - in fact, there is evidence that some US outlets (in particular FOX) had also used Nepal or India protest videos/photos and claimed them to be Tibet.
No wonder a lot of Chinese are indignant over the western media coverage.
I accidentally stumbled upon this news here. Otherwise I would not have suspected such a systematic, global misreporting by almost all the media outlets in the west.
Germany's N-TV's apology:
N-TV said that a still photograph and a video sequence shown on March 20 in a report about Tibet had in fact been taken in Nepal. It said editors had noticed the error and subsequently replaced the images.
"We are extremely sorry," an N-TV spokesman said in Cologne.
Germany's RTV's apology:
"It's true that amid our detailed reporting on the Tibet conflict, there was one case where a picture was displayed in the wrong context.
"The picture actually shows security forces in Nepal. It was taken on March 17 in the capital Kathmandu while Nepalese security forces were responding with truncheons to demonstrators protesting against Chinese policies in Tibet.
"We erroneously created the impression that the scene was of the unrest in Tibet and showed Chinese security forces.
"We apologize for this error, while pointing out that RTLaktuell.de reports without bias," the news site said.
The problem is, these are not isolated mistakes. This website details many more such "mistakes," from such reputable media outlets BBC, CNN, Washington Post, Fox News. In the case of Fox, apparently they used a photo of India police arresting terrorists on their website and captioned as "Rioter Roundup" in Tibet (that picture has now been quietly replaced). I guess in Fox News' mind Tibetans=terrorists.
Of course, credit is where credit due. CNN did put out a detailed interview of James Miles of Economist, who gave a firsthand account of what happened in Lhasa.
How could this kind of mass misreporting happen? I don't believe that any of the reporters were doing this with malicious intent. However, because China-bashing is political correct, is safe, and is cool, so everyone and his brother wanted to hop on the bandwagon. The sufferage of the Tibetan people is an important problem that China and the world must face. However, this kind of prejudiced, careless reporting does more harm to the Tibetan cause. People, please don't let your prejudice blind your eyes.