There are hints of a broadcasting boycott of the Beijing Olympics if the Chinese authorities do not relax their current media censorship.
After Hubert Lacroix, director general of CBC Radio Canada, wrote last week to the Chinese ambassador to Canada to demand that his company's websites should be unblocked, CBC TV's executive vice-president Richard Stursberg mused in public about "the potential implications of even a small boycott".
A leading French sports commentator, Bernard Faure of France Télévisions, has already announced that he will not attend because of China's human rights abuses. And his station has warned that it might not broadcast the opening ceremony if the Chinese authorities impose any kind of censorship.
German chancellor Angela Merkel, Czech president Vaclav Klaus and Polish prime minister Donald Tusk have made public their intention not to attend the opening ceremony.
A lengthy article in Time magazine, Will the Olympic torch burn China? began by pointing to the nonsense of the London relay in which a phalanx of police was required to prevent demonstrators seizing the torch. Instead of harmony, the event displayed discord.
Meanwhile, China appears more and more unlikely to stand by its previous pledge to allow journalists to report freely during the Olympic games. As Time notes, "it remains unclear exactly how they intend to deal with the estimated 30,000 foreign reporters expected to witness the event, all of them eager to take advantage of Beijing's own regulations specifying that they can interview anyone Chinese who agrees to talk."
The magazine quotes an unnamed western academic "who has close ties to the upper echelons of the Beijing establishment" as saying: "They still don't have any idea what is going to hit them or how bad they will look to the outside world."
.png?w=600)
