Why is Falun Gong out of the media spotlight?
If operating under the assumption that media in democratic societies impartially reflect world realities, the easy explanation would be that the Falun Gong issue has gone away—either the Communist Party is no longer persecuting Falun Gong or, on the contrary, it has more or less completely crushed the group. But as the rest of this volume demonstrates, that is not the case (although the latter is a common misconception). More likely, a range of factors and dynamics have created what is often referred to as a media bias. Critics from Noam Chomsky on the left to L. Brent Bozell III on the right have censured mainstream media over a range of biases. John Patrick Kusumi of the China Support Network, for instance, argues that Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Peter Jennings for years grounded the bias of not seriously discussing human rights in China on U.S. television. Laurell Leff’s Buried by the Times (Cambridge, 2005) even details how America’s top paper obscured one of the twentieth century’
