The so-called “Beijing 6″ were ultimately sentenced, through an extrajudicial proceeding (they did not get to go to court), to 10 days of detainment. As some of us guessed, it turned out to be shorter, with the end of the Olympics.

I received a message via Facebook that one of Brian’s colleagues, Jeffrey Rae, called his father to say he and others were being put aboard an Air China flight to Los Angeles.

I haven’t had the time to summarize and annotate my thoughts on the media coverage of the detainments. I’ve been trying to help make some connections between Brian’s family and the media, and hold down the day job as well.

I suppose the short version of such thoughts would be this:

The articles I’ve seen in the New York Times, Agence France Presse, the Associated Press, and elsewhere have not given much space to the broader context of the Students for a Free Tibet actions, or other protests, and have not bothered to acknowledge the different roles of some of those detained. Not all were participants in the protest. Brian, Jeffrey Rae, and others are asserted to have had a purely documentary role (and my personal knowledge inclines me to believe this). No evidence has been presented to the contrary and yet they’re all implied to be people who knowingly broke the law (however unjust it may be). That may be true for some of them, but some were not even breaking the law as best we can tell.

While what these detainees have suffered is far less than what Chinese dissidents have suffered, the “Beijing 6″ and a couple others have received special treatment with respect to the precedent set in handling previous alleged disruptions during the Olympics.

The former has only been glazed over throughout the Olympic coverage and the latter only mentioned in passing in a couple of reports so far. The facts are lightly reported and the context only exists for those of us who read voraciously and cull as much we can. The papers and the wires have done the public no favors in understanding this situation.

Eowyn, Brian’s wife, shared this thought with many of us overnight:

I’ve spent a lot of today pondering a question that came to me sometime last night — If this is how the Chinese government treats US citizens when the eyes of the world are focused on China, what do they do to Tibetan and Chinese activists, who have no real rights, when no one is watching? I can’t even imagine.

Update: This evening I heard of a report on NPR yesterday, and heard another for myself today that actually distinguished the two different groups of detainees related to the Students for a Free Tibet incident — using the terms “activists” and “citizen journalists.” An improvement in accuracy.

I think “citizen journalism” has become a bogus term. (The synonyms that Wikipedia currently suggests are mostly better.)

To me, one can reduce it to either you’re doing journalism or you are not. Journalism does not have to mean professionalized, dispassionate, (allegedly) neutral stuff that one hears about from the lofty offices of the broadcast networks (paid for with what, anything less than socially acceptable hush money from sponsors?). It does have to mean getting your facts straight, it does mean independent thinking, and challenging unsupported assertions before you endorse them as fact. Some of the most revered journalists in American history were often also called activists. They had credibility because they were still independent, and the facts they reported held-up.

Before the term citizen journalist was born, members of the DC Indymedia center (such as it was at the time), were accredited by the Washington Metropolitan Police Department with press credentials. I point this out only as a way to say that I think since then, “citizen journalist” has only served to make it easier for people actively trying to contribute to community media to be marginalized further than they already naturally were (by way of not having thousands or millions of dollars to back them). There is now what is seen as lesser category to cage people in, regardless of their work product, before getting to “real journalist.”

I think the term was coined with positive intent. It is part of the vernacular of an ebullient forward-looking analysis of new media and the power of the Internet to democratize. I get it, but I do think that general usage has possibly confused things for some, diluting a sense of what journalism is and giving an impression of a sort of false dichotomy within journalism (not that there aren’t any others).

This is a roundabout reaction to the news that my friend, Brian Conley, founder of Alive in Baghdad, and a ‘”citizen journalist”‘ says the press release, is being held in a Chinese jail. I wonder if this citizen journalist component will be played-up somehow (by all sides?), and I fear this could cloud fundamental issues of human rights. Extra labels do not always help. I hope for the best, we were to collaborate soon in another effort.

He appears to have coordinated with some Tibet activists to document some of their protest. Just because NBC news (to pick one) probably wouldn’t do this (they’re busy giving us objective analysis of the Olympics with their China-hired Kissinger associate) and because he chose to show an interest in the Tibet cause does not make this not journalism.

In fact, with the associations being no secret (as opposed to the false projection of untouchable so-called objectivity) and his work as verifiable as anyone else’s, it makes it even more real journalism.

The New York Times quotes a Chinese Olympic official, Qu Yingpu, in response to the protests of the Olympic torch tour as saying “This is not the right time, the right platform, for any people to voice their political views.”

His own apparent belief that he can say that with any authority is politics.

Never mind the inherent nationalism that is always present at the Olympics.

What is poorly articulated in the most well-intentioned statements of this sort is a widely shared desire for the Olympics to be a unifying experience, despite the nationalistic undertones, and generally not a polarizing sort of experience.

That’s great, but there is no getting rid of the politics.

I get the feeling that not all the statements are well-intentioned, and I don’t just mean the ones from Chinese officials this year. I think the Olympics are something of a business, and business is always political too.

That aside, it seems futile to to me to achieve an ideal by proclamation, attempting to exclude voices of the real controversies and atrocities of the world—particularly those in which the hosts, and implicitly more powerful than most other participants in the given year’s games, have a role.