Absurdity, Allegory and China

I don’t need to remind anyone who has been in China for longer than it takes to clear customs that sloppy and/or false reporting can do a lot of damage. Today I read the blog post of a man in Shanghai, who was “quoted” by AFP concerning the most recent blocking of Youtube here in China. I am purposely not passing on either link, since I do not think the man in Shanghai needs any more attention, and the AFP needs a slap to the head rather than anymore traffic. The reporter “quoted” a blog entry from October 2007, called it “yesterday” and attributed it in an article dated today, March 25, 2009. The man who was quoted was neither contacted, nor was he even in China. He was very gracious in his follow-up blog post by entitling it Lazy Journalists. I may have taken a bit harsher title and tone. I have a particular dislike for this sort of thing. I have no idea if the ‘journalist’ who wrote the story is in China either, though it would not surprise me if he were not. This has become the nature of the biz.

Last summer during the Olympics Jonathan Haynes of the Guardian reported the following story: Olympic games: Climbers held over Tibet banner protest in Beijing The story was inaccurate. Mr Haynes said the “pair abseiled down the building’s glass facade and hung their banner over an Olympics billboard with the slogan Beijing 2008.” I immediately wrote to the Guardian and let them know that it was physically impossible for anyone to abseil from top of the new CCTV HQ Building and end up draping a banner over a billboard near the Jintaixizhao subway entrance, unless they had wings. What had happened was that, in all likelihood, “the pair” had climbed up the back of the billboard framing – security was virtually non-existent at the time – and abseiled (I’d call it more like hanging from ropes, but abseil has a much more death-defying sensational flying aspect to it) down the front of the billboard, draping their message over the smiling grandmotherly face that faced west overlooking the East Third Ring Road. (I wrote about this incident here.) I didn’t expect any response, so I was not disappointed when I received none.

When I read today of the AFP shoddy reporting I went back to see if the August 15, 2008 Guardian story was still up. So, I googled it – guardian abseil CCTV – and there it was right at the top…. But wait, it was not at the top! There was another Guardian story at the top, from the day after I’d written them to let them know how wrong they were. This one was by Marina Hyde, entitled Olympics: CCTV quickly wears out its welcome with singing the country’s praises. Unbelievably, an extremely cheeky Ms Hyde even embellished the story more, as if abseiling weren’t enough:

Much better to settle down with a remote control and the fine state broadcast service that is China Central Television – somewhat unfortunately abbreviated to CCTV. How to give you a flavour of its news values? Yesterday five protesters abseiled down the side of CCTV’s head office – that breathtaking, Mobius strip-like glass structure in Beijing’s financial district – unfurling a vast Free Tibet banner. Police spent up to an hour getting them down, yet the incident was not referred to, much less shown, on any of CCTV’s 18 channels. In fairness it is always difficult when a story breaks as far as two feet from your watercooler, so let us assume it was simply unable to get any reporters or cameramen outside in time.

Ms. Hyde grew the “pair” to “five” and also had the CCTV HQ Building manned and operable, reporters glibly jawing around the watercooler as men abseiled past them in protest. Couldn’t anyone have told her that the building she was writing about was a construction site and that how she wrote it up had nothing to do with how it actually went down? Had she ever seen the building before she wrote her story? I don’t know what to say, other than …. I won’t even bother.

Jonathan Watts of the Guardian, the current president of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China (FCCC), is a man I respect and who’s writing on China is top notch. Perhaps he can get his paper in line, especially when they are writing about China. (Just to clear the air, there is no political motive to this rant. I lean very heavily in the Guardian’s direction, which is perhaps why I expect more of them. And anyone who follows this blog knows my feelings concerning CCTV.)

Someone needs to tell the rookie at the AFP that this is China, and that misrepresenting someone or something that someone has said or written can sometimes have weird repercussions. Last year all the foreign members of a US-based NGO were thrown out of the country because of a false (and malicious) report. This sort of thing happens. None of us who were here can forget last year when the reporting seams came completely unstitched. We don’t need any more of that. Editors need to do their jobs. And we don’t need any more journalists combing blogs to fill out their stories, then getting it wrong except for the name. We are in a country where reporting is a sham. We don’t need you guys contributing any more to it. You’re not supposed to act like CCTV.
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UPDATE – March 26, 2009 7:10 AM
I was contacted by the AFP a few hours after I posted the above piece, and I was told that the article had been changed, so it no longer included the man’s name and the misquote from their original story. I pointed out that the story had gone out over the wire (or whatever it’s called these days), and those who had picked it up had not made the changes. I noted one particular ‘down under’ large online newspaper. I was told that they would look into that, though my sense is that “looking into that” is a fruitless effort once the story is picked up by any number of other news orgs throughout the world. This morning I checked the site that had picked it up, and just as I had suspected, no changes had been made. The pair of misinformed Guardian pieces cited above are also still available, though I had no expectation that they wouldn’t be.

FURTHER UPDATE – 8:38 AM
For more on this story see here.