The whining by journalists about China's Internet restrictions at the Olympics in Beijing rings hollow: It belies how interested they are in actually reporting anything that might run afoul of the China's Communist censors. How convenient to blame packet sniffers and blocked network ports, instead of actually wearing out shoe leather tracking down protesters. Oh, but how much easier to refresh Amnesty International's website from the air-conditioned comfort of the Olympic Village. Actually showing up at a protest will get you detained without a trial, as muckraking videoblogger Brian Conley and friends have discovered. It's hard to meet deadlines from jail, so best to stick to hard-hitting reports about cheerleaders. A bonus: People actually enjoy watching that stuff.News Corp. has long treated the government in China with a velvet touch, and NBC's parent General Electric, with its huge infrastructure arm, has billions of reasons not to risk their investment in the games with any actual balanced reporting from China. In fact, American corporations like Nike are figuring out that having a state willing to bully and muzzle the press can have its upside. But before you go spinning media conglomerate conspiracy theories — there's a secret memo from Rupert Murdoch himself telling editors to take it easy on China! — remember that it ultimately boils down to individuals making reporting decisions based simply on trying to keep their jobs. Conley is no stranger to courting the ire of local officials — he and colleague Jeff Rae, who has also been detained, once regaled me over dinner in New York with a story about almost ending up behind bars while covering unrest in Guatemala and southern Mexico a few years ago. And the Iraqi citizens reporting for his site Alive in Baghdad don't just court jail, but death. So Conley and Rae couldn't have possibly been too surprised when, while following fellow foreigners specifically to record their protests, they got caught up in the dragnet. His company, Small World News, runs on a shoestring budget, and frankly the interest generated by his detention provides the kind of publicity neither he nor Students for a Free Tibet could otherwise afford — but only outside of China. As an entrepreneur trying to build a business, the jail time may ultimately help Conley out. But will it actually change China's policies? As anyone at Google or Yahoo can tell you, complicity with China has proven much more profitable than principles.