Radio-Canada, the national French Radio and TV station in Canada, broadcasted at its eight o'clock prime time program Enquete on the evening of October 30 a documentary, Uneasiness in Chinatown (Malaise dans le Chintown in French), which has risen a lot of social attention on the issues of Falun Gong in Quebec.
Uneasiness in Chinatown is a 40-minute documentary made by Producer Léon Laflamme, female journalist Solveig Miller and a shooting team in nearly one year and with a great deal of efforts. Featuring a large amount of interviews and careful editing work, with extremely extensive and rich content, the program adopts positive news coverage perspectives and introduces to the audience on a systematical and concentrated basis many illusive aspects of Falun Gong, which have been little exposed to and known by ordinary people. It centers on the analysis of controversial aspects of Falun Gong and records the process of 7-year lawsuit between Chinese Press and Falun Gong, including the interviews of President Crescent Chau of the newspaper, who spoke to the media for the first time.
Since Falun Gong was banned in China, this has been the first program produced by the mainstream media in the West with a comprehensive and objective approach, which makes it totally different from the misleading jaundiced perspective featuring previous coverage. Instead, the program explores Falun Gong objectively, specifically, and justly.
It's November now and the 7th anniversary of our winning the lawsuit, making it a perfect timing for the broadcasting of the program. During last nine years, this is the most objective, positive, and fair coverage of the issue by western media, revealing their professional ethics, sense of justice, and conscience, which shall be highly appraised.
President Chau pointed out that, in terms of the program, the producers should be admired for their respect to the career, their professionalism and integrity. They raised many questions for audience to think about by themselves with the undisputable facts they provide in the program: (1) Falun Gong claims itself to be a social group without any organization, yet with a large propaganda system integrating newspapers, TV stations and websites, with the on-going demonstrations, events and activities, people might find it hard to believe that there is no organization behind all these; (2) Li Hongzhi claims that Falun Gong does not accept any donation, then how can they support all these activities and where does the fund come from? (3) In the name of religious belief and cultivation, the nature of Falun Gong is actually a political movement anti-China; more and more facts show that Falun Gong has got strong supports from political organizations hiding behind.
As one of the leading and the most popular news programs of Radio-Canada, Enquete broadcasts during the prime time and attracting a large amount of audience. Please click the following link to view the online CBC program Uneasiness in Chinatown (in French): http://www.radio-canada.ca/emissions/enquete/2008-2009/Reportage.asp?idDoc=67209 .
(The Chinese Press, November 10, 2008)
