when the hipster artist met the Chinese authorities

any of the commenters at Gawker, as is their style, prefer to snark about the detention of graffiti artist James Powderly (along with many other protesters of all stripes) by the Chinese authorities for the display he mounted in Beijing:

But others understand that it’s no joke to be jailed in China,

I think this is awesome and courageous.

Really? Tiananmen Square was awesome and courageous. This is just self-aggrandizing and pointless.

Really? Going to prison in China is no joke. It gets a message out there for people to see and that is important. Would you do it?

how is this self-aggrandizing, exactly? He’s in prison, and I’m sitting on my ass in a (somewhat) comfy office chair reading about thinking “shit, I feel bad for the Muslims and non-Kool aid drinking Chinese when the Olympics are finished

There’s a lot of other reporting about this worrisome incident too, as you can see at this Google News link. But there’s nothing about this incident on Memeorandum.

Why is that? I thought the blogosphere is supposed to be much more informative than the TV newsbiz. The internet and TV are sharing news-viewer eyeballs, according to Pew.

I was hoping that the internet would be an improvement on the MSM. Right now, it’s Moe at Gawker—yep, Gawker—who’s reporting news that people should be aware of (because it’s a head-on collision between Western political culture [and freedom of expression] and Chinese “authoritarian” political culture [no freedom of expression].

So kudos to Moe at Gawker for going where the newsbiz doesn’t go.

Not that, say, the New York Times isn’t trying to cover China soberly–it most certainly seems to be.

[T]he Beijing police still sentenced the two women [in their 70s] to an
extrajudicial term of “re-education through labor” this week for
applying to hold a legal protest in a designated area in Beijing, where
officials promised that Chinese could hold demonstrations during the
Olympic Games.

Then the NYT goes and ruins its coverage with an almost incomprehensible level of naivete about the Chinese regime [e.a.]:

It is unclear why the police have detained people who sought permission to protest. [Really? Which part of the maniacally controlling Chinese government's motives is unclear? Huh? ---ed.]
Some political analysts say the police may be refusing to enforce the government’s order, announced last month, to allow protest zones. Chinese lawyers and human rights advocates also suggested a more cynical motivation — that the authorities were using the possibility of legal demonstrations as a ploy to lure restive citizens into declaring their intention to protest, allowing the police to take action against them. [You don't say! Fancy that! ---ed.]

When it comes to a Communist (or formerly Communist) or an “authoritarian” regime, there’s no use in wondering why it does what it does. It does it (whatever outrage “it” is) because it can, because it holds total power over the people it rules. Once upon a time, the people who wrote for the New York Times assumed that their readers knew this. Now it’s unclear whether even the journalists writing these stories know these things or if they’re just playing dumb. Oh well!

But even if the NYT were to give it to us straight up, the paper just doesn’t have a big enough megaphone among those who live online. Which, these days, is a lot of us. And the appetite for news doesn’t seem to be too large either.

Here are some more findings from that Pew survey:

• In spite of the increasing variety of ways to get the news, the
  proportion of young people getting no news on a typical day has
  increased substantially over the past decade. About a third of those
  younger than 25 (34%) say they get no news on a typical day, up from
  25% in 1998.
• A slim majority of Americans (51%) now say they check in on the
  news from time to time during the day, rather than get the news at
  regular times. This marks the first time since the question was first
  asked in 2002 that most Americans consider themselves “news grazers.”
• Social networking sites are very popular with young people, but
  they have not become a major source of news. Just 10% of those with
  social networking profiles say they regularly get news from these sites.