media - Newsweek and Time cover China

Jeremy of Danwei reviews the coverstories by both Newsweek and Time on China and sounds very mild:

It's a shame that whoever writes the cover lines decided to go for such sensationalistism. And when you consider that Massage Milk, the star blogger of the piece, says that the recent shutdown of his blog was a joke directed against Western media, you realize that it's not exactly Beijing vs. bloggers here. It seems that very, very few people are blogging for revolution in China.

From the Newsweek story:

The success of [now 30 million registered] blogs is changing Chinese expectations. The controversial reports found on the Web—and the vibrant, individualistic, often emotional style in which they're written—have underscored how hollow the state-run press is. Indeed, whereas in the West bloggers tout themselves as an alternative to the mainstream media, in China they in many ways are the new mainstream: rather than, say, watching bland programs on state-owned CCTV, many urban Chinese turn to Web sites such as Sohu.com, Sina.com and Baidu.com for breaking news—and then disseminate that information via e-mail and mobile-phone text messages. "A Chinese blogger is just like an American columnist," says Zhao Jing, a journalist whose popular blog on Microsoft's blog service, MSN Spaces, was recently shuttered on orders from Beijing. "We jour-nalists can't tell the truth, so we tell it with blogs."