Thursday, January 22, 2009

BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Obama speech censored in China

Interesting. Read the full article.
BBC NEWS | Asia-Pacific | Obama speech censored in China 'To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history,' the president said.

Once again, Xinhua included the passage in full in its English version, but the sentence was taken out of the Chinese translation.

Similar changes were made to versions of the speech that appeared on other websites based in China.

And websites were not the only media organisations that struggled to report some of the comments made by President Obama.

China Central Television, the country's main broadcaster, aired the speech live with a simultaneous Chinese translation.

But when the translator got to the part where President Obama talked about facing down communism, her voice suddenly faded away.

The programme suddenly cut back to the studio, where an off-guard presenter had to quickly ask a guest a question.

Censoring sensitive news reports is nothing new in China, where officials go to great lengths to cut critical material.

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