After vocal objections by some of its alumni, the Nieman Founda-tion at Harvard University has dropped a plan to train Chinese officials on how to deal with the news media when the Olympic Games are held in Beijing in 2008.
Bob Giles, curator of the foundation, said on Thursday that he had a change of heart because of concerns from a constituency that had originally supported him -- the current class of Nieman fellows. They worried that an ongoing controversy over the training session could damage the Nieman name, he said.
The Nieman Foundation had been asked to participate by the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard, which was planning a weeklong session at the end of next month for 40 Chinese officials.
Ezra Vogel, a research professor at Harvard who spearheaded the idea of the training session, said he was postponing the session because of the foundation's withdrawal and also because the Chinese officials had not paid for their hotel rooms and financing from the Chinese government was uncertain.
Giles had told an alumni meeting in Cambridge on Sunday that he saw the Nieman participation in the session as a chance to convey the values of a free press to the Chinese. Several alumni protested, saying the Nieman program should not be helping a repressive government learn techniques that could thwart Western journalists from doing their jobs.
Two alumni from the class of 1961 sent out a petition urging the Neiman to cancel its participation. None of the respondents so far supported the program.
RSS