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Chinese Bloggers Stage Hoax
Carl Bialik from WSJ writes "It seemed like the latest instance of a recurring story: Two Chinese blogs had shut down, apparently the victim of government censorship. 'Within hours, English-language bloggers and Western news media spread the word that the Chinese government had closed the sites,' the Wall Street Journal reports. The BBC spread the word, and its report was picked up by the French free-press group Reporters Without Borders. 'But in this case, it appears the Chinese government wasn't involved, the WSJ reports. 'By Thursday, a day after the shut-downs, the blogs were back up and running. In an interview, Beijing-based journalist Wang Xiaofeng of Massage Milk says he shut his blog down to make a point about freedom of speech -- just one directed at the West instead of at Beijing. He calls the Western press "irresponsible" and says that the hoax was designed "to give foreign media a lesson that Chinese affairs are not always the way you think." ' The BBC later corrected its story."
-Kurt
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
I also submitted this story, linking to http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2006-03/1 4/content_534795.htm for further information.
It just shows that Western media has a standard agenda of politicizing everything, and that checking sources is not honored by Western journalists (who really should set a good example on this to show Chinese journalists how to do it).
Now the crowd here will come up with ingenious "what ifs" and other excuses, actually defending this bad journalism. It is Us and Them nomatter what, as usual.
The western press isn't perfect at detecting liars. As a result, they should shut up and say nothing at all.
... what was it called again? Oh yeah, Afghanistan.
What a bunch of bozos.
Am I pissed at the western press for giving Bush a free pass for so many years, and still showing a suprising lack of backbone even today? You bet. Does that mean the press offers nothing of value (even on those subjects it slants in ways I disagree with)? No.
So a couple of government-friendly bloggers decided to stage a hoax and mimic a shutdown so many bloggers have actually experienced at the hands of that same government, just to draw out the press and discredit their message that "censorship is wrong."
Well, maybe they're congratulating themselves, but I'm not buying their criticism. The press is imperfect, and downright wrong from time to time. Reporters are often lazy, doing more googling and reprinting of press releases than actual research, and courage seems to be lacking from many news organizations (and others appear to be outright owned by supporters of the current conservative regimes in many places, including Australia and the USA).
However, faking a blog shutdown in a way that mimics dozens of real shutdowns, then screaming 'ha ha! fooled you you dumb free speech westerners' is like staging your own kidnapping, hiding out, then going public with how stupid the news media is for reporting your disappearance and possible kidnapping. The media has plenty of faults, but not detecting every case of fraud and deliberate deception is hardly a reason to dismiss every news they report, particularly with respect to repressive regimes.
Hell, if the media were able to detect hoaxes and lies so easilly, Bush, Blair, and their respective administrations would get a whole lot less airtime, and we wouldn't be busy fighting a war in Iraq instead of fighting the War on Terror we were supposed to be fighting in that other country, hundreds of miles to the east
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The media being irresponsible? NEVER! We have the highest quality of sensationalistic Journalism that money can buy!
"Your Children are in danger of being sexually molested by crazed monkeys in certain areas. News at eleven that you can't afford to miss."
"If I were bound by all laws everywhere I'm sure I would have committed a capital crime somewhere."
Journalists today often do not fact check any more than the bloggers they denounce. That's why this lesson was necessary and will need to be repeated several more times. The "mainstream media" is not differentiating itself from bloggers because no one expects us to fact check every post and its references because we're amateurs. Calling bloggers "citizen journalists" is flattery that none of us deserve. When blogs do fact check, it's like a mechanic doing some engineering work, but the journalists are behaving like engineers who are too proud and lazy to actually do basic mechanical work on their own machines or software. You don't expect the mechanic to be able to partially redesign something to get it working better, but when they do, you respect that. However, you ought to expect an engineer to be able to maintain what they've built, and the media shows no signs of being willing to do professional grunt work as "lowly" as fact checking.
Another important lesson here is that the media often doesn't do its job when it comes to presenting Americans with a deeper report on totalitarian governments and violence abroad. So far, no American newspaper has reprinted the Danish cartoons, allegedly out of respect for Muslims. Yet the New York Times will report on something as safe as "Piss Christ" which is significantly more of an attack on Christianity than those cartoons were on Islam. Why? Because then they'd have to worry about Islamists carbombing the NY Times. If they wrote scathing exposes of China, Syria, Libya and other states like those, they might have to worry about those countries' security and intel agencies killing their reporters abroad.
I guess I fail to see the irony here. A Chinese blogger posts a vaguely worded story meant to imply that the government shut him down, and the media reports it, and corrects the error the next day. How is this "proving a point"? The news media get things terribly wrong without anyone helping them all the time. I guess this guy has never seen an episode of The Daily Show.
As a media hoaxer, he really needs to learn a thing or two. There's been some very big media hoaxes over the years, though I can't remember anything recent. Everyone knows the War of the Worlds radio hoax by Orson Wells of course.
AccountKiller
This bizarre hoax makes about as much sense as a Pinochet supporter disappearing and reappearing during his reign, to make a comment on the Western media's coverage of the 'disappearance' of many of his protesters. It amounts to nothing less than hide real injustices in a thick fog of doubt.
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
That's strange. Every poll ever conducted seems to show that the left wing is massively over-represented within the media organizations....yet you'd like us to beleive that the media is "censored" and reports in favour of the right wing. And who, pray tell, is oppressing and censoring all of these brave left-wing journalists?
I don't agree. Reporting news is a serious issue and the facts should have been checked first, which clearly wasn't done. They made a very valid point.
He's collaborating with those who try to suppress it.
This is true, but all he proved was that you can lie to media so they get fooled, not that they generalize that shut down Chinese blogs is automatically being censored or anything like that. His own lies destroyed that possibility.
If all he made was show that journalism can be sloppy, then what's new here and why even bother? It's hard fact that in today's competition among newspapers, being out with news first is the only thing that counts. This has very little to do with free speech as well, so I don't really know what he's going on about there. Sure, freedom of speech can make people spread false information, but does even harming freedom of speech laws help against that? Hell no!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
To each their own. I'm Canadian. I think all of you Americans are fucked up. But we love you just the same <3 :-)
Mostly it isn't left vs. right but just the conclusions they make. AT&T out sources 200 jobs to a tech firm in England [or something] and all of a sudden they're "unamerican". Or there is such a thing as "war on terror" or "civil war in Iraq was inevitable anyways".
You guys really need to headsmack the whole media and stop going for the juicy soundbites which have irrelevant usefulness and actually come to the root of things.
I mean why was Enron so successful for so long? Was the media really looking that hard?
Why is Cheney not in prison? What exactly is a "hunting accident" anyways?
etc, etc.
You guys seem to skim over the real issues when they're new and juicy then just give up on them.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
When you lie about something that could easily be true, and the person you're lieing about (the Chinese government) is unreliable, then people will oftentimes believe you. Granted, it is irresponsible to assume that something is true without proper verification, but that is the real "point" here, and isn't really related to "free speech."
Of course, she did urge people to "act forcefully to remove a government administration playing games of smoke and mirrors and vicious deceit.". I think it's the "act forcefully" part that gets you investigated. Plus, she *was* using a government computer for non-work related activities. You can get fired for simply checking your personal email on a gvt. computer sometimes. Plus, you just spoke out about Bush. Are you being investigated?
You'll have that sometimes...
Big difference between slaves who died 150-300 years ago, and protesters who died less than twenty years ago.
Infanticide? A lot of people would call aborton exactly that, so you're not off the hook there either.Yeah, I agree that it's wrong--but at least we're not forcing people to do that, as they do in China.
Not to mention dumpster babies, which America has had more than a few of.
A statistically insignificant number--and again, not the result of official coercion.
Many forced sterilisations back around the beginning of the twentieth century, and lots of Americans who think that we should bring back that kind of eugenics.
That was a long time ago.
Executing convicts? At least China doesn't execute children and the mentally incompetent. Oh wait, America finally bannd executing the mentally incompetent, although children are still fair game.
I don't believe that a child has been executed in the US in well over a century--possibly ever. We have executed adults who committed crimes as teenagers, which strikes me as perfectly decent: a 17 year old who rapes and murders is just as deserving of punishment as he would be if he'd waited a week.
And the idiots in the Supreme Court outlawed the practise anyway last year, in clear contravention of precedent and the plain meaning of the Constitution.
Also, AFAIK China does this still...
Censorship? Obviously you haven't been paying attention to the Republican's latest attempt to stop the media from revealing their crimes.
You're begging the question: was there a crime? There's a lot of very strong evidence that there was not. The laws in question would merely prevent publishing legitimate secrets, which is no big deal at all.
And the constant threats against Iran ...
You mean the rogue state lead by a lunatic who worships an imam in a well and who threatens to wipe Israel from the map? You think we shouldn't try to keep them in line?
Don't dupe yourself -- America is a fascist state, and has been for some time now.
Don't kid yourself--America is nowhere near being a fascist state. Look, I disagree with a lot of what our State does (I'm a right-libertarian), but we are far, far from a regime like Hitler's, Stalin's, Mao's or even Gorbachev's.
And in any case, your objections are irrelevant: even were we as bad as you think, that would not make the Chinese any better in an absolute sense.
You had a lot of good points, but lost most of them in the assumption that we are all American. There are other parts of the world you know. Your American-centered view is disheartening.