I REFER to last Tuesday's article by Mr Ching Cheong, 'Propaganda that kills - Beijing puts party and leaders first, never mind values and the people'.

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There is any form of freedom in China. If there is an election,China wil collapse. China is the land of all evils.

So lying to the people and the world is ok as long as it is for the greater good?

Goes to show how backward StraitsTimes is when it comes to coverage of news and development in china. Looking at the views of MM and PM, really glad that they have very different perspective and greater depth of understanding of China.
Most people in China today goes to the Internet for news and information. And looking at the discussions and reports in chinese websites and forum, everyone is very much aware of what is happening. So there is a lot of information freedom in China. The level of disucssion of issues in Chinese forum and websites is alot more mature than what we think. Be it the snatching of Olympic torch, protest by westerners during the olympic games, terror attakcs in Xinjiang even taxi drivers in Beijing know about these.
The recent vote on the US$700B bailout is a great example of how the US government manipulate the press. The media kept interviewing folks and kept the pressure to influence the public. The bailout plan is definitely unfair, the existing shareholders and management of all these banks will get to keep their money (at artificial prices to be bought by US taxpayers). If the sub prime crisis were to happen in China or even Singapore, we can be quite sure that the bank management team is likely to be thrown into jail and the Finance Minister will have to resign. But not the US ............ press freedom?

Most people in China today goes to the Internet for news and information, but websites which the CCP(Chinese Communist Party) deem as politically against the CCP are blocked. So, unless the people there want to break the law and risk being punished by the CCP, they can't get news or info available on these websites.

In the US, it is thanks to the free press that people get to know whether the bailout plan is bad or good. Wouldn't it have been worse, if the 'Central American government' had just blocked news about the bailout plan, not allowing citizens to know how bad or good about it through the media?

In whatever countries..

Press Control or manipulation through press...choose one :P

Whether unintentionally or intentionally, government-controlled or not, the press may be seen as having a certain bias for or against a government.

My choice would be a free press with different news outlets having different slant, so that I can get different perspectives and independently come to my own conclusions. Press control just leads to one standard view( anti-whatever, or pro-whatever). It stifles independent thought.

The CCP didn't block all the news. All the Straits Times news were second hand, picked up from the Chinese websites! So these are "anti government" news that the Straits Times have access to.
The bailout plan is so complicated and in so many pages that Layman will never understand the content or how it work. The whole western political system is so confusing for the laymen that nobody can understand or change anything. A few vocies can "say this or that" but really a group of folks can even start a war and poured missiles into another country based on literally lies! Isn't that scary?
So what the press and government do is to present favorable headlines and scant info over range of all topics. The US election is more like the American idol contest.
The point is all government and the press have an understanding of where the line is. Every government will have a list of "on my side journalist" and "on the other side journalist" that they uses.

Mr Lee failed to read the articles where the local government was sent a letter by Sanlu to handle the potential fallout when news was threatening to become public.

Sanlu and other companies didn't evade Chinese government control. They were happily adding this into their products because government control didn't exist. Already some bureacrats have lost their jobs.

A free press not afraid to take on the government here WOULD have helped. The financial crisis in Wall Street is rather different. The ways in which the crisis unfolded was so arcane financial experts are still trying to decipher how this thing lasted so long. Your average financial journo isn't going to understand it.

It doesn't take a medical doctor however to learn that putting a certain chemical that can cause kidney stones into milk formula to be a bad idea.

#8 According to an editor of a respectable Chinese(not Western) news outlet, the CCP blocked news about the melamine-tainted milk scandal for some time.

But the bailout plan is at least made public, and at least there would have been citizens who would understand. Wouldn't it have been worse, if even those could understand were not able to get to know about the bailout plan?


http://sg.news.yahoo.com/afp/2008100...a-920821f.html