Peaceful Protesting and Petition in UGA against CNN

By Huanyao Gao, UGA

April 20th is an unusual day. In this day, Chinese students and faculty of UGA came together to give western media a heavy blow on their biased reporting on recent incident happened in Tibet, especially the racial discriminated words said by Jack Cafferty, a commentator of CNN. They use actions to express their discontent against CNN and their proud to be Chinese people in this world.

Since the violent crime happened in Tibet on March 14th, many western media have been looking at this incident through colored spectacles and reporting it biasedly and prejudicially. Some media even purposely used faked photos from other country just to “prove” the violence is from Chinese government and army instead of those real criminals. These are all contrary to the basic rules of a news report, that is, the authenticity and the objectivity. Later on April 9th, Jack Cafferty from CNN asserted that “Chinese products are junk”, “Chinese people are goons and thugs”. He has completely transgressed the professional ethics as a commentator and the conscience as a human. All of these have roused great indignation among the Chinese people around the world including

On April 20th, 2pm, dozens of Chinese students and faculty start to gather around the symbol of UGA, the Arch. Soon the Arch was packed with people participating the peaceful protest and petition. Though preparation time was limited before the event, everyone did their best to bring family and friends. Some of them brought their little children, and some of them even brought their loving pet dog. The final amount of participants is a lot more than expected. Many of them stayed up overnight to make slogan posters with “CNN Liar”, “Fire Cafferty”, “We want true apology from CNN”, “Freedom doesn’t equal to racism”, “Stop racial discrimination”, “Stop malicious slandering”, “Racism hurts”, etc, on them to express their feelings and requests. The most significant one of the slogans are the signing sheet made by the Chinese Student Union. It was printed with “We want true apology from CNN! We want justice, equality and dignity!” The 4 square yards’ sheet became full of signatures of people asking CNN for a sincere apology after the event started. The participants held the national flag of China and slogans highly, singing the national anthem of China and other patriotic songs and yelling their request for apology from CNN. Many passerby stopped and inquired about the details. What really moving was that employees from local Chinese business, Peking Resturant, came and brought free water to the participants to support the protest.