Unblocking access
- 26 Mar 08, 11:00 AM
Last week, I wrote on the blog about the difficulties we were facing reporting from China. There have been two interesting developments since then. This morning, the Chinese made good on the promise by the Premier Wen Jiabao to take a group of international media to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. The bad news is they decided not to invite the أغر؟´«أ½ on the trip. We will be able to show you what they are allowed to see - cameras from the Associated Press news agency are on the trip. But it's no substitute for first-hand reporting.
Fortunately, we now have another source of material. As you may have seen elsewhere, the Chinese authorities appear to have . It's not clear whether this is a permanent or temporary move. What it does mean is that we now have thousands of readers inside China. Typically fewer than 100 people read stories from Chinese computers - but yesterday that figure jumped to more than 20,000. And it means that comments have been flooding in to أغر؟´«أ½ forums from all over China - many providing a different perspective on the violence and our reporting of it.
There's no doubt that many in China are annoyed at the way the western media have reported the story. A video on takes the أغر؟´«أ½ to task for captioning what appears to be an ambulance with the phrase "there is a heavy military presence in Lhasa". It was a mistake. We don't always get it right - when we get it wrong, we need to say so. On this occasion, the caption was not appropriate for the photograph. The facts are not in dispute - there is a heavy military presence in Lhasa - but we should not have captioned the photo in the way we did. However, to suggest that this is part of an orchestrated campaign is unfair. The أغر؟´«أ½ has no agenda - our job is to report all sides of the story. Which is precisely why we want to be allowed into Tibet.
Jon Williams is the أغر؟´«أ½'s world news editor
