Word: press
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...East European satellites. Nagy and four of his top aides were executed in 1958 after a secret trial and buried in an unmarked grave. Earlier this year, their bodies were exhumed for a formal, cathartic reburial. "Never again should such a terror occur," Miklos Vasarhelyi, Nagy's former press secretary, told the crowd. "We hereby close once and for all a tragic, painful epoch to be able to open a new page in the history of our nation...
...bloodiest urban massacre in Communist China's history never took place. Thousands of troops never stormed the perimeters of Tiananmen Square. Hundreds, probably thousands, of students never died. Photographs depicting bloodied faces and battered bodies, news footage documenting the clatter of gunfire and the crunch of army tanks, foreign press reports detailing the pileup of dead and wounded bodies at hospitals -- none of it happened...
...early-morning hours of June 4, troops were viciously attacked by rioters brandishing fire bombs and guns financed by "overseas reactionary political forces." The reluctant soldiers exercised maximum self-restraint, but were finally compelled to open fire. Even then, General Li Zhiyun insisted last week at a press conference, "it never happened that soldiers fired directly at the people." In the end, nearly 100 soldiers and policemen were killed putting down the "counterrevolutionaries." Civilian casualties totaled no more than 100 dead, perhaps a thousand wounded. That's the official story...
...desperate enough -- to buy the government's line. But they are toeing it, as a sullen normality descends on the city. Although most of the tanks are gone, the streets still teem with helmeted soldiers, AK-47s poised at their sides. The handwritten broadsheets that served as a free press have been peeled from walls, but perhaps some cyclists are heartened as they spot one last declaration chalked on the Forbidden City: THE FASCIST GOVERNMENT OPPRESSES THE ENTIRE PEOPLE OF THE COUNTRY. It is impossible to know what the people are thinking; they have lapsed into silence...
...real danger, however, was that foreign press crews might continue to disseminate truthful information, blackening the Chinese government's careful whitewash. At midweek officials charged two American correspondents, Alan Pessin of the Voice of America and John Pomfret of the Associated Press, with violating martial-law restrictions, and gave them 72 hours to leave China...