Been playing cat-and-mouse out West on the Tibet beat, and the cliche resonates on a few too many levels. When your movements are cut off and cornered by shifting, shrinking boundaries, you're prone to feel like just some lab rat in an uncontrolled test of reform. It’s very hard to prove any side right, and much easier to slip into the trap of going wrong. 

Indeed some inconvenient slip-ups have occurred. In turn China's state media machine, along with many hostile Chinese Netizens, have pounced on the Western news media, accusing certain outfits of distorting images of the rioting and condemning the press corps in general for allegedly slanting coverage to demonize China and focus on the victimization of Tibetans. The topic of media perceptions is worthy of debate -- Western media did make some mistakes in recent coverage, including serious photo caption errors. But needless to say,  the government has cropped down its own narrow version of events. The state media lens trains on outbursts of violence by Tibetans, and blocks out government treatment of them before and after the fact.

In an awkwardly timed interview a week and a half ago, Reuters asked a top government media chief in London whether relaxed travel guidelines on foreign correspondents would be extended beyond the time of the Olympics and Paralympics in Beijing. The provisional guidelines, unveiled on Jan. 1, 2007 and due to expire this September, have freed up journalists to work in all regions of China (except for Tibet) without story-specific approvals from local government offices.  Unlike in the past, all that's needed now -- according to the new rules -- is interviewees' consent. "Since this new regulation is so popular," answered State Council Information Office vice-director Cai Mingzhao, “Why should we change it?"

One big reason the regulation needn't be changed is that its implementation still can and does change on the ground. Our boundaries sure have shifted over the last two weeks. Correspondents emerged from Tibetan hot zones with more first-hand coverage of being shut out of those areas than of the areas themselves. Most of those who got somewhere owe it to colleagues who reported back from the front on their run-ins with authorities.

Our story was a little bit of both.