From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone.

According to the Chinese government, more than 20 people have died this month during protests in Tibet.

According to Tibetan exiles, nearly 140 lost their lives.

It's been hard for Western reporters to get a firm grip on the

numbers or even the players. Jeremy Goldcorn is the founder and director of Don Way.org, a media

analysis site based in Beijing, he says that both East and West have fallen into an information

gap. The two views are pretty extreme.

On the one hand, you have the hippie, smiling, peaceful Buddhist monks

that tends to be the perception in the West.

And in China, for most Han Chinese people, which is most of the country,

they tend to think of Tibet as a brutal, feudal country

that was liberated by the Communist Party from its feudal shackles

and then has had a great deal of investment. I don't mean here to, you know, defend anything the

Chinese government has done in Tibet particularly. But I do think what is missing from the

reportage is nuance. I think that the situation is not as clear-cut as it can seem for various reasons,

you know, mostly through the Chinese government's own issues.

It's very difficult to get information from Tibet.

They're not a lot of journalists there.

They're not a lot of research organizations.

NGOs have a tough time to operate.

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