Awaiting a democratic Hong Kong.
A week or two ago, I said I wanted to write about the interview I had and the problems I encountered. I still do and I still will, and when I finally get a bunch of stuff sorted out. I hope to talk extensively about the issues of "Self-Censorship," what it is, why is it important, and how it differs from institutional censorship and why it’s actually a more insidious in terms of free speech.
There isn’t a lot of readily available material so I have off to think about it a bit more. In the meantime. I found this rather interesting story about "Self-Censorship" on the Hong Kong Democracy Now Website. It was written in 1997, but some of it still holds true today.
Let’s call a spade a spade. We should stop calling
the sickness "self-censorship" and name it what it really is
— censorship. Front-line journalists seldom censor themselves. Their stories
are usually killed by their superiors. It is plain old censorship. Chief
editors, senior managers, and publishers are doing dirty works for the
government to water down criticisms or spike offensive stories.
Self-Censorship Is Dead
Yan Sham-Shackleton Online 
wikipedia has turned the tiananmen “massacre” into “protests”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989
self-censorship is truly insidious, too often perpetrated in the name of “objectivity”
LikeLike
Actually. They are right. The way they have written about it is about protest. the Masscre was the end of it. Personally I feel that it’s bad to catergorize it as a “Massacre” because although that’s how it ended, people don’t put enough emphasis on what it was supposedly for. Which was democracy. It was a DEMOCRATIC MOVEMENT. That’s how we remember it is Chinese. 89 Mun Web. 89 Democratic Movement. In fact I would prefer it to be movment opposed to protest as well.
Although we should remember what China did. I think even more we should rememeber what the people died for.
yan
LikeLike
your point about distingiushing the movement from the massacre and emphasizing its evolution is a good one- i agree that wiki does do this.
but it also fails to even mention the massacre of june 4, instead choosing ‘crackdown’ & ‘showdown’. clearly this is designed to placate the chinese gov’t. i think this is a mistake and an example of how insidiously censorship creeps into acceptance.
LikeLike
Was that writing by April 5 always offset like that on your blog? Or was that just done yesterday?
LikeLike
it was ALWAYS off set like that.
LikeLike