Major Left-Wing Blogs Appear To Be Virtually Silent on Google-China Censorship Issue

Tom Blumer
January 29th, 2006 2:59 PM
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Here's a real puzzler that I hope I am wrong about:

Am I the only person noticing a silence, bordering on total, from the big lefty blogs?

There are plenty of examples in history of the Left looking the other way when oppression rears its ugly head. Just one -- the non-reactions of presidential candidates Gene McCarthy and George McGovern in 1968 when the Russian tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia and crushed the Prague Spring, as documented by Evans & Novak in their column just before that year's Democratic convention (sorry, I don't have a link, but I remember it like it was yesterday; e-mail me if you have a link).

If I am correct, the big left blogs' ignorance of the Google censorship story may be yet another instance of "see no evil" when it's perpetrated in the name of a Communist government.

Here's what I've done to check into the coverage (as of roughly 2:30 PM ET; click on the links indicated to do the searches yourself):

  • A search on " Google" and "China" at Daily Kos gave only results pre-dating Google's move in both instances. (Note: The Kos searches were very slow when I did them, and you may have to try multiple times to get a result.)
  • A search on "Google" and "China" at MyDD yielded the same results -- every listing pre-dated Google's move.
  • A very recent entry (12:18 today) at Daily Kos, an entry that may not have been indexed for search yet, did cover Google's move, only to ask: "Has anyone noticed that the American government is BEING MORE INTRUSIVE THAN THE CHINESE ONE? at least in some ways .....". Uh-huh.
  • I also did a great deal of scrolling through entries at Daily Kos and MyDD while doing a browser word search on "Google," and found nothing.
  • A browser word search on Atrios's archive page for January 22-28 on "Google" and "China" found nothing, nor did a browser word search on his home page today.

I can't say for certain that there is absolutely nothing other than the single Bush-Bash entry I found about Google's China censorship at these three sites, but if there is anything else, it certainly isn't prominent.

So who's really living in a bubble? Is it asking too much to expect SOMEONE, especially the bigwigs, at three of the left's top blogs to notice that over a billion people are having what they can see filtered by an oppressive regime?

Say it ain't so, Kos, and Atrios, and MyDD.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.