As Sam Husseini noted, one of the things we'll miss about print newspapers is ironic juxtaposition of stories. The front page of Yesterday's New York Times (1/20/11) provided a classic example: There was a story about Chinese President Hu Jintao visiting the White House, headlined (in the late print edition) "Obama Raises Human Rights, Pressing China." And right next to it was an article about how the Obama administration was acknowledging that Guantanamo would stay open indefinitely, with some prisoners to be held forever without trial, while others would be tried by military tribunal instead of a civilian court because they had been tortured while in custody. The story about Obama championing human rights didn't mention Obama institutionalizing human rights abuses, or vice versa.

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank (1/20/11) didn't see the irony; instead, he saw Obama and the White House press corps sharing one of their finest hours. Describing AP's Ben Feller asking Obama at a joint press conference "how the United States can be so allied with a country that is known for treating its people so poorly" and asked Hu to "justify China's record"--and Bloomberg's Hans Nichols repeating the question when it was ignored by Hu--Milbank wrote:

It was a good moment for the American press. Feller and Nichols put the Chinese leader on the spot in a way that Obama, constrained by protocol, could not have done. The White House press corps has at times been too gentle on Obama (recall the adulatory pre-Christmas news conference), but on Wednesday afternoon, Obama and the press corps were justifiably on the same side, displaying the rights of free people.

One of those rights is the right to be much more concerned about human rights abuses when they occur in countries other than your own. I suspect that Hu was less impressed with the press's demonstration of this freedom than Milbank was.

With Chinese leader Hu Jintao in Washington, you got some of what you might expect in right wing  media outlets--Rush Limbaugh doing a fake Chinese accent, and Bill O'Reilly opening his Fox show last night with crack about a Chinese dinner that wasn't take out.

Meanwhile, on public television's Charlie Rose Show, the hour was spent with... Henry Kissinger. I had to go back to the Extra! archives to remember the Kissinger/China connection, which includes most notably his defense of the Chinese crackdown on Tienanmen Square. From Extra!, 10-11/89:

In recent months, Kissinger has used his high media profile in a spirited defense of China. In a Washington Post/L.A. Times column ("The Caricature of Deng as a Tyrant Is Unfair," 8/1/89), Kissinger argued against sanctions: "China remains too important for America's national security to risk the relationship on the emotions of the moment." He asserted: "No government in the world would have tolerated having the main square of its capital occupied for eight weeks by tens of thousands of demonstrators."

Kissinger's defense of China and other repressive governments has sometimes raised eyebrows. What it has not raised is tough questions from TV interviewers about Kissinger's business ties to these same governments. In a column alluding to FAIR's study that found Kissinger to be Nightline's most frequent guest, the Washington Post's Richard Cohen (8/29/89) sounded an urgent appeal: "Will someone please ask Henry Kissinger the 'C' question?" The "C" stands for conflict of interest.

When he's not pontificating in the media about foreign affairs, he's engaging in foreign financial affairs through his secretive consulting firm Kissinger & Associates. The firm, representing some 30 multinational companies--including American Express, H.J. Heinz, ITT and Lockheed--earns profits by "opening doors" for investors in China, Latin America and elsewhere (New York Times, 4/30/89).

A Wall Street Journal article by John Fialka ("Mr. Kissinger Has Opinions on China--and Business Ties," 9/15/89) reported that Kissinger also heads China Ventures, a company engaged in joint ventures with China's state bank. As its brochure explains, China Ventures invests only in projects that "enjoy the unquestioned support of the People's Republic of China." The Journal article was unusual in exploring the private business interests behind U.S. foreign policy, not the media's strong suit--even when, as in Kissinger's case, they are rolled into one person.

Did Charlie Rose want to interview someone on China with skin in the game? That would be a strange standard for public television.

When "journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling stepped back onto American soil after being detained in North Korea for over four months. Their safe return was covered widely in the American media, and rightfully so," writes Women In Media & News guest blogger Tristin Aaron (8/12/09), "yet their reason for traveling to North Korea has been all but forgotten in the media reports on Lee and Ling":

Euna Lee and Laura Ling were reporting on the trafficking of women from North Korea into China. As Ji-Yeon Yuh notes in, "What Were Laura Ling and Euna Lee Looking For in North Korea?": "Of North Korean women and girl refugees in China, an estimated 80 to 90 percent are victims of trafficking. This is likely the highest percentage of trafficking in a single population."...

Further, these victims of human trafficking are treated as criminals by North Korea, and as illegal immigrants in China. Writing for the Women’s Media Center, Ji-Yeon Yuh highlights a gap in the media's coverage not only of the story Euna Lee and Laura Ling were reporting, but of coverage of North Korea in general: "The wider world takes little notice of these victims, with mainstream media closely focused on the issue of North Korea’s nuclear weapons."

Read all of Ji-Yeon Yuh's story on the website for Aaron's Women’s Media Center. And listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "John Feffer on North Korea" (5/29/09).

Arianna Huffington's latest column (Huffington Post, 7/13/09) presents a compelling portrayal of the power of new democratic media--versus the self-preserving corporate model of news gathering--in the Chinese government response to major riots last week: "It choked off the Internet and mobile phone service, blocked Twitter and Fanfou (its Chinese equivalent), deleted updates and videos from social networking sites, and scrubbed search engines of links to coverage of the unrest." But here's the rub: "At the same time, it invited foreign journalists to take a tour of the area":

That's right, it slammed the door in the face of new media--and offered traditional reporters a front-row seat.

China's leaders realized that it's one thing to try to spin the on-the-ground views of bussed-in reporters ("To help foreign media to do more objective, fair and friendly reports," in the words of the government's PR agency), but quite another to try to spin the accounts and uploaded images of tens of thousands of Twittering and cell-phone camera-wielding citizens.

The Chinese have clearly learned the lessons of Iran.

As Huffington reminds us, "the truth is, you don't have to 'be there' to bear witness. And you can be there and fail to bear witness."

Driving home the point that "the conclusions drawn by eyewitnesses are greatly influenced by the eyes doing the witnessing," Huffington then excerpts one of the most damaging journalistic examples of this in our time:

Clad in nondescript clothes and a baseball cap, [a scientist who claims to have worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program for more than a decade] pointed to several spots in the sand where he said chemical precursors and other weapons material were buried. This reporter also accompanied MET Alpha on the search for him and was permitted to examine a letter written in Arabic that he slipped to American soldiers offering them information about the program and seeking their protection.

So wrote an embedded Judith Miller, "bearing witness" to the "silver bullet" proof of Iraqi WMD in the New York Times in April 2003.

Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald gets the site's lead story today (5/8/09, ad-viewing required) with an excerpt from the New York Times obituary for U.S. fighter pilot Harold E. Fischer Jr., who, as the Times headline puts it, was "Tortured in a Chinese Prison." Greenwald deems such naming of Fischer's ordeal--"kept in a dark, damp cell with no bed and no opening except a slot in the door...handcuffed. Hour after hour, a high-frequency whistle pierced the air"--to be "a major editorial breach" for the paper that so agilely dances around the T-word when reporting on U.S. actions:

So that's torture now?... Using the editorial standards of America's journalistic institutions--as explained recently by the NYT public editor--shouldn't this be called "torture" rather than torture--or "harsh tactics some critics decry as torture"? Why are the much less brutal methods used by the Chinese on Fischer called torture by the NYT, whereas much harsher methods used by Americans do not merit that term? Here we find what is clearly the single most predominant fact shaping our political and media discourse: Everything is different, and better, when we do it. In fact, it is that exact mentality that was and continues to be the primary justification for our torture regime and so much else that we do.

Along those same lines, I learned from reading the New York Times this week (via the New Yorker's Amy Davidson) that Iraq is suffering a very serious problem. Tragically, that country is struggling with what the Times calls a "culture of impunity." What this means is that politically connected Iraqis who clearly broke the law are nonetheless not being prosecuted because of their political influence!

Luckily for us, such a scenario could never play out under the press' watchful eye (let alone with its outright endorsement) here in the U.S. where "everything is different, and better."