@alien how about you look through the evidence and tell us. seems like flogging a very dead horse otherwise.

I don't know. In a perfect world, I wish the Chinese could enjoy the kind of press/advertising freedoms we have in the West. On the other hand, I can appreciate the immense challenge the government has in managing 1.4 billion people, so many of whom (as in the West) do not have the benefit of a well-balanced education and developed critical thinking skills.

BTW, here's another source that may help us think about news bias. Whether or not you agree with how news sources have been placed on the graph, it does offer food for thought. The graph seems to represent what I vaguely imagined in my mind. The "Green Rectangle" is where I get a lot of my news. I very much like to read The Economist which falls into the "Yellow Rectangle" along with the National Review which I don't care for. I'm guilty of using CNN (which I would place further to the left) and Huffington Post, but I try to balance that with occasionally checking out Fox News and The Federalist.

"how-biased-is-your-news-source":

www.marketwatch.com/[...]

I would like to be able to watch youtube, often linked from home on my online newspaper. I also used to watch instructional videos.

I would also like to use FB without restrictions.

I would also like to be able to use my apps, some of which seem to have been blocked in the last month or so. Personally, I cannot see how Sworkit fitness app was a threat.
Cleanup seems to be an excuse for other purposes, which may include creating a closed market for some Chinese apps.

@Stratocaster: For the most part I don't go along with the terms or methods of the link article from marketwatch - for one thing, it seems to be very heavily weighted on English-language sources in the US and UK, and assumes that that which is in the middle of the spectrum is less biased than news sources to the left or right - but even if I did, how would one judge what is 'liberal' (in US usage of the term) or conservative, or biased or moderate or whatever, in Chinese media and the greatwalled Chinese internet? Perhaps the state will tell us?

liberal in australia = rightwing

I tend to look at bbc.com - for well balanced, professional, investigative reporting, without the left/right bias and the usual pop-up ads and flaming blogs. It's news as opposed to the dubious and debatable entertainment masquerading as news.

@alienew: "who thinks the national campaign is a good/bad idea"

I think that the national campaign in China has so many agendas that one cannot simply agree or disagree with all of those collectively.

However, most of this (I believe) aims to increase social stability and the party's rule.

Without considering whether increasing social stability and party's rule are good ideas on their own, is the campaign good idea to reach those goals?

To that I think the answer is yes.

> who thinks the national campaign is a good/bad idea

While it's ok to discuss these issues, most people ONLY read this type of news ... and that's where the problem is to me.

Because at the end of the day, what difference does your opinion really make? Will they change their policy if you don't like it?

To me, REAL NEWS, and the news that matters MOST, is information that you can use and then implement in your own life.

@dolphin: "at the end of the day, what difference does your opinion really make? Will they change their policy if you don't like it? [...]

following politicians and what they're doing is a fool's game."

That's not the whole of it.

Depending on who "they" are, making them change their policies is not the only or often even the first option.

There are things that an individual in most countries, even in China, can do on their own.

For example when a populist anti-immigrant party "won" (or rather broke through in) election in my home country (years ago now), many opposers of such policies jumped to suggest that they will now leave the country in protest - of course only few actually did.

In China when the communists came to power, there was a mass exodus abroad, even with very limited information and connectivity of societies compared to today.

More than giving you something that you can use in your everyday life, news should serve to educate individuals about things that they wouldn't learn otherwise.

Perhaps the issue here is, that "information that you can use and then implement in your own life" is quite subjective - we should not assume that information that is useless to us, is the same for everyone else.

ok. good points janjal.