Just hours before 20 children were killed by a lone gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. last week, a man in China stabbed 22 children at a primary school in Henan Province.
The main difference between the two attacks is that none of the Chinese children died, though several had severe cuts and severed fingers or ears.
The coverage of the two attacks in each country in the hours afterward was also strikingly different. In the United States, the news media got many of the details of the attack initially wrong in the rush to report as much information as possible.
Reports erroneously attributed the attack to Ryan Lanza, when the gunman was actually his brother. The attacker's mother was said to be a teacher at the school, when she had no affiliation with it. The children were supposedly shot with handguns, when the killings were carried out with a rifle.
But the media in America did report a great deal of information, and for the most part, American authorities let them.
In China, however, it appears there was a concerted effort by the Communist government to suppress information about the Chinese attack, in favor of covering the Connecticut shooting.
"In an instant, information about the deadly gun attack in an American school that claimed 28 victims blanketed Chinese media," wrote Han Zhiguo, a Chinese economist and blogger.
"The majority was headline news. On the same day, there was a campus attack in Henan province's Guangshan county, in which 22 students were injured with lacerations, with seven seriously injured enough to be sent to the hospital. Mainstream media seemed deaf and dumb to it; you could only find information about it on Weibo," he said, referring to a Chinese blogging website often shut down or censored by the Communist government.
The leaders of the village where the stabbing attack took place seem to be under a gag order from party officials, and reporters are having trouble finding information about the attack. The names of the injured children have still not been released, whereas family photos and tearful remembrances of the children killed in Connecticut saturate American news.
The Chinese blogosphere has erupted with outrage over what they see as callousness on the part of Chinese officials.
"From an ocean away, as soon as the American shooting occurred we speedily learned the number of dead and the whereabouts of the killer. In our own country, we can't hear anything about [the stabbing]. American children died, the President cried; even if it was just for show, the Chinese children don't even get that!" wrote Weibo user am0814.
While Americans may complain about media overexposure and "if it bleeds, it leads" journalism, it could be much worse. It could be silent.
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