No absolute freedom of speech

It's a big pity that the Western media rushed to join in the debate sparked by Chen Yongzhou, a Chinese tabloid journalist who was detained on charges of defaming a construction equipment maker, while only a few of them paid much attention to Jimmy Kimmel's "kill every one in China" comment, which should surely have been even more eye catching.

Chen has been portrayed by many Western media outlets as the latest "victim" in China's "new curbs on journalists, lawyers and Internet users". ABC talk show host Kimmel praised a boy's idea to deal with US debt crisis by "killing every one in China" as "interesting", which outraged Chinese people, but did not provoke much criticism from his fellow journalists.

These two unrelated incidents raise a common question: speech freedom is a shared value, but what are the boundaries of this freedom?