(Clearwisdom.net)
Greetings Revered Teacher! Greetings Fellow Practitioners!
I am a Dafa practitioner from Berlin. Here I'd like to report my cultivation experiences of interacting with the media in 2008.
1. Be the Main Actor of the Human Play and Seize Every Opportunity to Explain the Facts
Beijing hosted the World Olympic Games in 2008. The whole world's attention was focused on China. Major media started planning their Olympic reporting in 2007. I realized that this was a great opportunity for us to let the media know about the persecution in China. Since most sports reporters knew little about China, they wanted to gather more information before going there. As Dafa disciples, I realized that we should take the lead and be the main actors in the big play taking place in the human world.
How to do it? Clarifying the facts to a few reporters would be easy; spending one's own money to rent a facility and inviting the media was also possible. However, these were far from Teacher's requirements of clarifying the truth with more intensity and larger reach.
One day in May 2007, an idea came into my mind: organize a "China Issues Conference" for reporters who would go to China - gather them together to introduce the current situation in China, and talk about the persecution of Falun Gong.
Since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) started persecuting Falun Gong in 1999, Dafa disciples have spent a lot of their savings on truth-clarification projects. But our manpower and financial resources were very limited. I followed two principles for my work: try to utilize everyday people's organizations and networks to achieve our goal, and spend as little practitioner money as possible. But how could I find a media partner to help me?
My everyday job is a news reporter. In the following months, I talked to many reporters and people from research foundations about organizing a "China Issues Conference" whenever I met them. The feedback was positive, but I still didn't have a media partner to sponsor the conference.
During that time, I met a reporter who had a good understanding of the CCP. In many of our phone conversations and emails, I talked to her about issues in China and about the persecution of Falun Gong. I also shared with her my plan to hold the conference.
She introduced me to a sports reporter association in Germany that had over 400 members, many of whom would be going to China to report on the Olympic Games. This association liked my idea. It offered a facility for the conference and invited reporters to attend. I was responsible for organizing the conference. I was quite amazed to see everything happen so smoothly. I think Teacher made it happen because he saw that I wanted to seize the opportunity to clarify the truth. Just as Teacher said in "The Master-Disciple Bond" (Hong Yin Vol II, Translation A):
"When disciples have ample righteous thoughts
Master has the power to turn back the tide"
On January 11, 2008, the sports reporter association held the "China Conference" on the premises of a Berlin newspaper. Seventy reporters, including the directors of the sports section of the German flagship media Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Der Spiegel, and directors of the international division of German Television 1 and 2, came to the conference. As the Chief Editor of the Chinese language European Epoch Times, I gave a presentation about media censorship by the CCP. A video of my presentation was put on the web and circulated to German reporters.
An editor from the German Epoch Times presented "Falun Gong - From Public Exercises to Number One Enemy of the CCP." It was the first time that we had explained about the persecution of Falun Gong in front of so many German news reporters.
The Director of the sports reporter association wrote an article about the conference. Materials about Falun Gong presentations and pictures were also made available on their website. Several dozen reporters took the German version of Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party and a free copy of the anti-internet censorship software developed by Dafa disciples. Even on the opening day of the Olympics, some German reporters were able to send me email from the Beijing International Media Center requesting the latest version of the anti-internet censorship software.
When the German Epoch Times editor completed his presentation, a reporter stood up and said that Falun Gong was a "cult." He quoted from a lawsuit that occurred in Leipzig, Germany a few years ago, where a judge declared that the defendant who slandered Dafa was innocent citing "protecting freedom of speech." The reporter said that it was legal to say Falun Gong was a "cult." I had the urge to stand up to rebut. Then I realized this was my attachment to competition. I knew that only righteous thoughts and iron-melting benevolence could destroy all unrighteous influences. I forced myself to remain in my seat, and quietly listen to the German Epoch Times editor rebut from the legal angle.
After a few minutes of struggling in my mind, I felt my attachment to competition melt like ice and it was replaced by a warm benevolence. The conference ended quickly. I went to that reporter, and asked him what he knew about Falun Gong. He told me that he had seen our protests but had never actually met any Dafa practitioners. I explained to him about how cruel the persecution was, and told him about all the anti-persecution work being done by practitioners outside of China. His face softened and he looked like he felt sorry. Another reporter next to us handed me his card, so we could keep in touch.
Around midnight, I went to the sports reporter association's website to read their report. I saw that the negative statement about Falun Gong had been quoted, but not the German Epoch Times editor's rebuttal. We realized that the evil was taking advantage of the fact that we hadn't clarified the truth clearly enough to some people. We started sending righteous thoughts to eliminate the evil factors. In the meantime, I wrote an email to the reporter who introduced me to the sports reporter association, asking her to persuade the director to fix the report on their website. She was still up, but felt that the director might be too tired to correct the page.
I had a human thought that it would be very difficult to ask people to modify an article so late at night. While I was thinking, another article deviating from the truth got published on the same website. I realized that the evil was controlling everyday people to attack us aggressively. If I did not ask them to fix those articles, many sports reporters would get the wrong information, which would be really bad for them.
So I again emailed my contact and explained about the seriousness of the situation. I also told her about the positive comments about Falun Gong made by a religion researcher in Leipzig quoted during the lawsuit. Accidentally, I sent the email to the Director of the sports reporters association. I sent him another email immediately to apologize and explain that the email was intended for someone else.
I received his reply, a few minutes later. He was still up, and said that it was actually a good "accident" because he wanted to know about the lawsuit and the comments from religion researchers. I was so grateful to Teacher. Although it looked like I had made a mistake, I had sent the information to the person that needed to see it. The next day, when I went to their website, the web page had been updated based on our request. Persistence and righteous thoughts helped us to change the situation again.
2. Benevolence Solved a Challenge
For years, under the influence of the CCP, the German media would refer to Falun Gong as a "sect," which has a negative connotation, and reporters often refused to change it claiming that the dictionary doesn't suggest that "sect" is pejorative. I ran into a similar problem recently.
A German news reporter wrote an article for Spiegel Online disclosing that the Deutsche Welle's China Desk had been infiltrated by Red China. She mentioned Falun Gong in her report, but didn't use the word "sect." She told her contact practitioner that Spiegel Online's editor later added the word "sect" to her article. She said that she knew it was not good, but she was a freelance writer, and had to listen to the editor. In other words, she could not persuade the editor to change it.
That practitioner called me about the situation. Spiegel Online has a large readership. If it kept using the word "sect" to describe Falun Gong, the impact would be severe. That practitioner said, "I told her everything I could, but she said that she could not get the editor to change. If Spiegel Online really uses that word, we can go talk to the editor when the article is published." I did not have a solution either, but felt that we should not accept what was happening. I left for work, and on the way, called the practitioner so we could send righteous thoughts together.
I was riding on a slow-moving tram. A young, beautiful, and romantic-looking young woman sat next to me. Her cell phone rang, and when she started talking, her coarse words made me to look at her again. She was still beautiful, but her voice and tone were coarse. I suddenly thought, "A beautiful young woman like this must want to be seen as attractive. If she knew how her words made her look coarse, she would be more careful about her language."
Just then, I suddenly enlightened. When I wanted the reporter to persuade the editor to not use "sect," I was thinking about not misleading the readers and to not have such a mistake happen during activities that I participated in. But I wasn't thinking of the reporter herself.
She wanted to be a good reporter to disclose the Red Infiltration. Wasn't using "sect" to describe Falun Gong a part of the CCP's Red Infiltration? If not for the CCP media propaganda, why would the western media use such a word to describe Dafa? If she realized that using "sect" meant that she was accepting the Red Infiltration, would she still to use it? Putting myself in her shoes let me see a solution to the problem.
I called the reporter's contact practitioner immediately and shared with her my thoughts. She agreed with me whole heartedly. We should not only suppress the evil, but also be benevolent to people. She wrote the reporter another email, from the reporter's angle to tell her that using the "Red Language" to disclose the "Red Infiltration" was against her purposes. We didn't push her.
The next day, the article was published on Spiegel Online. The reporter had successfully convinced the editor to not use "sect" to describe Falun Gong. Every cloud has a silver lining. I realized that benevolent thinking helped us solve an impossible challenge.
Thank you Teacher! Thank you fellow practitioners!
Views expressed in this article represent the author's own opinions or understandings. All content published on this website are copyrighted by Minghui.org. Minghui will produce compilations of its online content regularly and on special occasions.
Category: Clarifying the Truth
