On "Pack Journalism"

Former Canadian embassador to Japan, Gregory Clark, had a similiar take on the subject:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CLA20060410&articleId=2245

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.

Mr. Clark's OpEd was originally published on the Japan Times:

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/eo20040915gc.html

UPDATE:

Declassified document from the NSA backed up Clark's assertion the troops were initially unarmed:

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB16/documents/09-02.htm

The Myth of Tiananmen Square Massacre

Most of us probably comfortably sat at home that night, watching the events unfold on TV. Very few people knew what really happened, as this event in America was spinned and twisted into the usual "hate-China" propaganda for mass comsumption.

However, our media made up for it recently. PBS aired a documentary titled The Tank Man.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/

The Frontline segment presented the Chinese government's casualty figure of 250 dead. I don't know if you ever researched this, but this figure is actually in-line with our NSA estimate:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989

The PBS documentary also dispelled the myth that students were "massacred" on TAM square grounds. If you haven't seen this you should. The documentary interviewed Journalists who were on the ground, as well as footages of thousands of students leaving the TAM square.

Actually, I have read this from another source years ago, from Columbia Univ. School of Journalism:

http://archives.cjr.org/year/98/5/tiananmen.asp

"as far as can be determined from the available evidence, no one died that night in Tiananmen Square.

A few people may have been killed by random shooting on streets near the square, but all verified eyewitness accounts say that the students who remained in the square when troops arrived were allowed to leave peacefully.

Hundreds of people, most of them workers and passersby, did die that night, but in a different place and under different circumstances."

[Just for reference, throwing molotov cocktail at riot police is a crime in US.]

And Jay Mathews’ intention is clear:

“Journalists have to be precise about where it happened and who were its victims, or readers and viewers will never be able to understand what it meant.”