Canadian paper offers possible reasons for bias

A report in Canada's national newspaper The Globe and Mail shows why many Western media made the same mistakes in reporting on the Lhasa riots.

Last Saturday's front-page story "How 3 Canadians upstaged Beijing" revealed the Dalai Lama's "government-in-exile" had "hired a full-time organizer for the Olympic-disruption campaign". It selected 28-year-old Freya Putt, from British Columbia, "who had spent years in the student movement".

From Washington, Putt "has steered a disorderly circle of thousands of volunteers on six continents into a carefully designed campaign all directed at the thousands of media outlets that are converging on Beijing".