As an update to our previous post on China, take a look a Xinhua News Agency (News.cn) coverage of the Iran situation. There is none to speak of. The story today is "Ahmadinejad urges U.S., Britain to stop intervening amid post-vote unrest "
Addressing a group of clerics on Saturday evening, Ahmadinejad "urged Western states, particularly the United States and Britain, to change their policies of intervening in Iran's domestic affairs," IRNA said.That's it. The official news is filtering information and is now telling private sources to do the same.
"Condemning interference of certain foreign states in Iran's domestic affairs, the president reiterated that the Iranian nation would not consider such governments as its own friends," IRNA reported.
Sterilize and twist information is the mantra. Try the following experiment:
1. Go to www.Google.com and type Tiananmen Square protests. The click on images. This is what you get:
2. Repeat this for www.Google.cn (the Chinese version of Google). Note that unless you are in China, this is not officially filtered. Click on images (图片) to get this:
The striking contrast speaks for itself.
However if you type in Iran protests, the results of the two searches become much more similar (it's newer information that hasn't been sterilized). That spooked the Chinese authorities and they asked Google to simply block access within China.
