An "anti-CNN website" brands the news channel as the world's "leader of liars", exposing what it calls errors in its reporting and in other Western news outlets.

The website was set up by a young graduate from Qinghua University in Beijing, Rao Jin, after overseas Chinese he liaised with complained about some Westerners' misunderstanding of China, according to the China Youth Daily.

An open letter asking all Chinese to rise up against the "Western Goebbels' Nazi media" -- a reference to German dictator Adolf Hitler's propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels -- has also been circulated on several online forums.

"The Chinese nation, peace-loving, refined and cultivated, has long swallowed humiliation and submitted to insults. It can no longer be a silent lamb," said the letter.

It asked all Chinese to send letters, faxes and emails to Western media organisations asking them to apologise to the Chinese people.

The English-language China Daily newspaper, which like all arms of the Chinese press is controlled by the government, reported on the Nazi reference and the "anti-CNN website" on its front page on Wednesday.

Videos have also been posted on YouTube, with titles such as "Riot in Tibet: the true face of Western media" and "Tibet Lhasa Riot Shame on Western Media!".

The criticism comes amid a barrage of strong criticism from Chinese authorities of the Western media for its alleged biased coverage of the riots in Tibet, with the local press echoing those complaints.

The official Xinhua news agency on Wednesday carried many articles lambasting the Western press, with headlines such as: "Biased media reports reveal credibility crisis".

The official Chinese articles do not make reference to the fact that foreign reporters have been barred from going to Tibet or neighbouring provinces where the unrest has occurred.

The state-run press also does not report on the statements by Tibet's government-in-exile that 140 people have been killed in the unrest over the past two weeks. China says there have been 20 deaths.

Protests began in Tibet's capital, Lhasa, on March 10 to mark the anniversary of a failed 1959 uprising against Chinese rule of the Himalayan region.

The protests spread to other areas of China with ethnic Tibetan populations.

China sent troops into Tibet in 1950 to "liberate" the Himalayan region, and officially annexed it the following year.

With the worst of the protests and ensuing crackdown apparently over, the Chinese government allowed a small group of selected foreign reporters to visit Lhasa on Wednesday.

AFP and many other major news organisations were not invited.

David Bandurski, a researcher at the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong, said the errors made by foreign media and highlighted on www.anti-cnn.org were mostly photo and caption mistakes.

Rebecca MacKinnon, formerly Beijing bureau chief for CNN, and now a media and Internet expert at the University of Hong Kong, said other serious incidents, such as the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in the Serbian capital of Belgrade in 1999, provoked similar reactions.

"In all of these cases, people who had access to the information from the outside chose not to believe it, and chose to side with their own government, even those people who were quite critical of corruption and other aspects," she said.

"But to wipe these off as all of these people are puppets of the Chinese government is to really misunderstand what is going on."

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