By Zhou Yan
Punch in Rediff.com, India's leading portal, and a Tibetan woman can be seen elaborating on the Lhasa riot in Mandarin, regrettably a language understood by about 20 percent of the world's population.
The woman, interviewed by China's Central Television shortly after the March 14 riot, can be seen accusing the rioters of sabotage. "They destroyed our good life, now that our children cannot go to school and we ourselves can no more get to work."
The English subtitles that appear on the video, provided by what was promoted as "the best multimedia news corporation in south Asia", the Asian News International (ANI), however, reads: "All the Tibetan people have gathered together yesterday on the street and the military men fired some tear gas, some poisonous ... and arrested about 10 or 20 people."
In one of the most impudent efforts ever to cheat the audience, the New Delhi-based ANI has deliberately covered the original sound bite and put in something else, as if the whole world could be fooled so easily.
Ironically, however, it hasn't forgotten all about its professional ethics: The attribute reads "Courtesy: CCTV".
While people across the globe are anxious to find out the truth about the riots in Lhasa and other Tibetan communities in western China, some media corporations have deviated from the basic principles of journalism, deliberately or indeliberately, by dubbing videos with fake sound bites, putting up photos with misleading captions and making groundless accusations of the Chinese government.
Among them are big-name news groups including the Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, BBC, The Times (of London) and several French and German media organizations.
I doubt if any of these biased reporters and editors have ever been to Asia. Maybe they are so fed up with their job that they don't even care to tune in to international news on TV?
Otherwise why do they take virtually every policeman, even all the dark brown skinned officers in Indian and Nepalese police uniforms, as Chinese?