news and the people

[Doug Millison]

Speaking of media representations in the service of political power...


From: "Michael Albert" <sysop at zmag.org>
To: <znetcommentary at tao.ca>
Subject: ZNet Commentary / Danny Schechter / Immolate This / Feb 20
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2001 18:07:44 -0800



IMMOLATE THIS
By Danny Schechter

What could be more dramatic? People setting themselves on fire in Tiananmen
Square in the heart of Beijing. CNN is there. The police just happen to have
fire extinguishers on hand. The victims are rushed to a hospital but only
after their agonies are photographed for state television.

Soon, these images of immolation rocket around the world, seeming to confirm
China's charges that an evil cult ordered brainwashed members to commit
suicide. Citing this new "evidence," their government insists, this proves
what it has been saying all along about those 'crazy Falun Gongers' is true.
These people must be banned as a threat to themselves and the nation.

For news readers and media consumers, perception often trumps unclear
realities. In a world where dramatic images overshadow complex issues, Falun
Gong looks bad. Case closed!

Score a big one for president Jiang Zemin's crusade to "crush" and discredit
a growing spiritual movement that is still resisting a state-ordered ban
despite the detention of an estimated fifty thousand practitioners and over
a hundred dead in police custody. Already, on the strength of this one
incident, the Financial Times proclaimed a "winner," as in "Beijing wins
propaganda war against Falun Gong." Note the headline. It doesn't refer
merely to a media skirmish, but to the war itself.

Many other respected news organizations disseminated this same story the
same way, even though they were unable to verify it independently, only
sourcing Communist Party controlled outlets. Now, as new questions are
raised and doubts expressed, it may turn out that the world media has been
misled into becoming an all too uncritical transmission belt for Beijing's
bullying.

The event happened on January 23, days after Jiang intensified his anti-cult
media campaign. CNN reported on it but its tapes were confiscated, so we
never saw them. Now China is threatening to prosecute CNN for "murder" on
the grounds that it allegedly had pre-knowledge of the incident.

Seven days later, China's official TV shocked the nation with footage of
five people engulfed in flames, pictures supposedly from nearby surveillance
cameras. Now, a tragically disfigured victim of the incident, a young girl,
12 year old Liu Siying says that her own mother told her to set herself on
fire to reach the ""heavenly golden kingdom" in some accounts, or "nirvana"
in others. She has become a sympathetic symbol, even a poster child for
alleged abuses by the "evil cult." Her image is everywhere; her tragedy has
outraged all China. Yet, only approved media outlets there have been
permitted access to her.

Was she a Falun Gong practitioner? That seems doubtful, after the Post's
Phillip Pan traced her to her home in Kaifeng, a town which experienced an
even more tragic disco fire in December killing hundreds, and scarring many
others. He discovered that her mother, who died in the Tiananman fire, was
not known locally as a practitioner, but was depressed, mentally unstable
and accused of beating her daughter and mother.

Significantly one of the CNN producers on the scene, just fifty feet away,
says she did not even see a twelve year old there. The government says
doctors performed a tracheostomy on the victims but a pediatric surgeon
said, if true, the child wouldn't be speaking right away.

Falun Gong practitioners told me their suspicions were aroused for four
reasons: 1) the people in the square, said to be long time practitioners,
didn't do their exercises correctly; 2) authorities did not show any
pictures or Falun Gong signs that usually accompany protestors or books
(which prohibit suicide), and 3) because when they checked on a school one
of the victims was said to have graduated from, they found it was closed at
the time, and 4) there is no concept of "nirvana" in their beliefs. These
maybe small details, but they could be telling.

Why did the deeply engrained instititutionalized skepticism of our own media
collapse so quickly in the face of what smells like a stagemanaged incident
being blatantly expoloited for political reasons? Why would so many American
news outlets be so gullible?

In my investigation into Falun Gong, I document a disturbing pattern of US
media outlets echoing China's charges, including frequent use of pejorative
words like "cult" and "sect." In some respects the media in our own country
also reflects a one-dimensional stereotyped perspective, downplaying and
denigrating a spiritual force that doesn't fit into simplistic categories
and which we may have trouble understanding because of its mystical
character and roots in a mix of a Buddist cultivation practice, Taoism and
traditional qigong. Falun Gong is often treated like the classic "other,"
too weird to be taken seriously or show sympathy towards.

In light of the prominent play this "mass suicide" received, it is not too
late to thoroughly investigate not only what happened but whether and if we
were all taken in.

Suicides are are rarely political. They are universal cries of personal
despair---and they happen where you least expect them. In ten years, there
have been ten very visible student suicides at MIT, many by jumping,
according to the Feb 4th Boston Globe. Says a teammate of 22 year hockey
star Lucy Crespo Da Silva who ended her life in December, "There just seem
to be upset people everywhere."



Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org, a global media website and is the
author of "Falun Gong's Challenge to China: Spiritual Practice or 'Evil
Cult' (Akashic Books, 2000) and a film of the sam


Danny Schechter
Executive Editor
Mediachannel.org
212 246-0202x3006
www.mediachannel.org
Eye On Global Media

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