The Myth of Tiananmen
Every June 4th Tiananmen incident still evokes an annual wave of harsh condemnations in the news and opinion pages of US leading national newspapers. This short article by journalist
Jay Matthews entitled
“The Myth of Tiananmen” completely upended that apparent reality.
The infamous massacre
had likely never happened, but was merely a media artifact produced by confused Western reporters and
dishonest propaganda, a mistaken belief that had quickly become embedded in our standard media storyline,
endlessly repeated by so many ignorant journalists that they all eventually believed it to be true.
Jay Mathews is a reporter for The Washington Post. He was the paper’s first Beijing bureau chief and returned in 1989 to help cover the Tiananmen demonstrations. With his wife, Linda Mathews, he is the author of One Billion: A China Chronicle. This piece originally ran in the September/October 1998 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.