HANOI, Vietnam — Three months ago, when police clashed with Catholic protesters over confiscated church land, the Vietnamese public didn't need to rely on the sanitized accounts in the government-controlled media. The public could read all about it on the blogs.
The photos and translated Western news reports about September's outlawed prayer vigils were posted in a Vietnamese blogosphere where anything goes — from drugs, sex and AIDS to blunt criticism of the communist government.
Until now the government has generally taken a hands-off attitude. But officials at the Ministry of Information and Communications appear to be losing patience. They say they are preparing new rules that would restrict blogs to personal matters — meaning no politics.
Blogs and unlicensed news Web sites have taken on added weight since a crackdown on journalists cast a chill over Vietnam's mainstream media.
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In June, two journalists who had aggressively covered a major government corruption case were arrested, and one of them was sentenced to two years in prison. Four others had their press cards revoked after running front-page stories decrying the journalists' arrests.
The bloggers were quick to react.
"We fought two wars to free ourselves from the shackles of imperialism and colonialism, all in the hope of having basic human rights," wrote Vo Thi Hao, a novelist and painter, on her self-titled blog. "Even the French colonial government allowed private media, opposition parties and free expression."
Such sentiments would never appear in Vietnam's state-controlled media, which are dominated by admiring stories of the country's leaders or dull accounts of the bureaucracy at work.
In the reporting of the vigils organized by the Catholic Church to demand the return of lands seized decades ago, the state media portrayed the protesters as lawless, while the bloggers portrayed them as principled and brave.
"I get information from the blogs that I could never find in the state media," said Nguyen Thu Thuy, a blogger who delves into her religious beliefs and family life. "Everybody has the right to free expression," she said in an interview.
Roughly 20 million of Vietnam's 86 million citizens use the Internet, according to the latest government figures. While high-profile bloggers are concentrated in the big cities, cyber-cafes can be found in all but the most remote corners of the country.
Any public criticism of the government would have been unthinkable a few years ago, but today's bloggers are sometimes scathing.
A popular Ho Chi Minh City blogger known as Osin recently chided Vietnam's top- ranking officials for chartering airplanes to fly to international meetings.
"A head of state should not use a chartered plane to show off," he wrote, pointing out that when the prime minister of Thailand visited Vietnam, he came on a commercial flight. "A politician's reputation does not depend on whether he can fly around in a big plane. It depends on whether he values the taxpayers' money."
Information and Communications Ministry officials did not reply to an Associated Press interview request.
Vietnam has yet to go as far as China does in suppressing undesirable Internet content. It blocks some Web sites run by overseas Vietnamese that the government views as a political threat. But it has not hindered access to Yahoo 360, a blogging platform highly popular with young Vietnamese.
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