A report in Canada's national newspaper The Globe and Mail shows why many Western media made the same mistakes in reporting on the Lhasa riots.
Last Saturday's front-page story "How 3 Canadians upstaged Beijing" revealed the Dalai Lama's "government-in-exile" had "hired a full-time organizer for the Olympic-disruption campaign". It selected 28-year-old Freya Putt, from British Columbia, "who had spent years in the student movement".
From Washington, Putt "has steered a disorderly circle of thousands of volunteers on six continents into a carefully designed campaign all directed at the thousands of media outlets that are converging on Beijing".
Putt also has connections with the "Tibetan government-in-exile". The story said she works closely with Kate Woznow, a 28-year-old Vancouverite who recently organized the disruption of the Olympic torch-lighting ceremony in Olympia, Greece, and Lhadon Tethong, executive director of Washington-based Students for a Free Tibet, who is working with the Dalai clique.
Putt was hired on the heels of a meeting organized by the Dalai Lama's Tibetan "government-in-exile" last May in Brussels, Belgium, according to the report.
"There, the exiled Tibetans decided that the Olympics should be the single focus of their activities for the next 15 months," it said.
The report also said: "The three women have been campaigning around the Olympics since 2000. At the time, they were simply trying to prevent China from getting the Games then, about 2005 or 2006, there was an epiphany, a realization that China's Games could be the ultimate opportunity to make a change."
A Chinese student in Vancouver, who gave only his first name, Mike, said: "This shows the riots were planned and organized long ago."
Huai Bao, a Chinese film student in Vancouver, said he had met the "free-Tibet" supporters before in North America.
"They are mostly self-righteous, highly opinionated and have a kind of black-or-white way of perceiving things," he said in an e-mail.
"The fact of the matter is that they live not only in a society where the biased media have been brainwashing people for decades but also have formed a one-sided perception of Tibet by hanging out with Tibetans in exile.
"These people cannot represent the majority of Tibetans living in Tibet in present-day China."
Mike said the fact that these Canadian women made it to the report shows many Canadian media approve of their actions.
"But distorted reports can only reduce the media's credibility," he said.
"Nowadays, there are plenty of pictures and videos on the Internet, from which we can easily tell what is authentic and what is fabricated."
(China Daily April 4, 2008)