Rewind: Kent State? How Journalists Mangled Metaphors on the Tiananmen

June 4th, 2014 8:58 AM
On June 4, 1989, the communist regime in China cracked down violently on democratic protesters in Tiananmen Square. American networks had provided weeks of coverage of the protests, and the crackdown was a global outrage. But both then and later, some national reporters embarrassed themselves by making odd comparisons between the communist crackdown and allegedly similar outrages in America: