Pack Journalism can be Lethal
Instead of checking facts, the media prefer to follow what others are saying
by Gregory Clark (former Canadian ambassador to Japan)
Global Research, April 10, 2006 Japan Times

Some call it pack journalism. It is also lazy journalism.
Instead of checking facts, the media prefer to follow what others are saying. And what others are saying is often inspired by establishment hardliners seeking to impose their agendas with the help of bogus news agencies, subsidized research outfits and hired scribblers.
Beijing is a frequent victim. One example is the pack journalistic myth of a Tiananmen Square massacre of students in 1989. All one needs to do to get the true story is insert "Tiananmen" into Google and read the reports at the time from none other than the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.
You will discover that the so-called massacre was in fact a mini civil war as irate Beijing citizens sought to stop initially unarmed soldiers sent to remove students who had been demonstrating freely in the square for weeks. When the soldiers finally reached the square there was no massacre. There were in fact almost no students.


As a researcher in 1989 for Human Rights Watch in Beijing,
Robin Munro witnessed first hand the weeks of pro-democracy demonstrations in the city

"I arrived at Tiananmen Square just after 1:00 a.m. on June Fourth. ...
.
.
Then one of them proposed a vote. ... A voice vote was taken, and ... we couldn't actually make out which of the shouts was louder, but it didn't matter, because the guy with the microphone announced that the democratic decision had been to evacuate, and sure enough, within a few minutes, people started getting up off the monument. They ... started filing out. The column was about five, six, seven people across, gradually formed, and they began walking away from the square. ... I'll never forget those faces, those young people's faces. They were walking out with their heads held high. They'd finessed their retreat from the square so well. They'd performed so bravely, and finally ... they'd made the right decision. There would have been no point in staying there. Everybody would have been killed. ...
... The students' decision to peacefully evacuate the square minutes before the final assault was definitely going to come, was a triumph of rationality over violence. It was a triumph of political wisdom and sanity over what was, on the government's side, panic, fear, cowardice in mobilizing an army against an unarmed citizenry. ... The future prevailed in the sense of those students who walked out of the square and said: "We've made our point. OK, you have the tanks. We're not going to let you kill us pointlessly."
The theater of the massacre was, by and large, elsewhere. It was the rest of the city, and that was where the Beijing citizens fought and died to protect their students, and also to protect the sense of civic pride and consciousness they themselves had developed in those crucial few weeks leading up to that.
... Reports in the week after June Fourth stated that troops had assaulted the monument about 4:30 a.m. and massacred all the students on the monument, saying that thousands of students had been shot down in cold blood. That didn't happen, and had it happened, I
wouldn't be here today -- as simple as that”

The irrational hate and racism of some of the posters here is pathetic.


Alex