|
Rebecca McKinnon
Jailed Chinese journalist Shi Tao won a top international journalism prize -- to the apparent chagrin of China's online censors. |
Suddenly yesterday my RSS feed reader started going crazy here in Shanghai. It took a while before I discovered what caused the constant stream of blockades by China's Internet filters that I could not circumvent with any of my available tools.
Obviously, China's "Internet nanny" (as we call the online filters) was upset. I could narrow my search down to Rebecca MacKinnon's weblog.
Currently MacKinnon is at the World Association of Newspapers conference in South Africa. There, the jailed Chinese journalist Shi Tao received WAN's Golden Pen Award.
As I wrote earlier, Shi Tao was jailed by the Chinese government with the kind assistance of Yahoo, making this case a permanent PR disaster for the Yahoo.
Due to the persistence of the online block I encountered yesterday, I became very eager to find out what was causing this reaction. I think this shows that the WAN award has his a raw nerve here.
Perhaps that's the function of this kind of prize.
