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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
As long as they don't shut down the plastic flower pot manufacturer's sites...2 005_03_29_001.jsp
But who knew that the 7th most popular non adult web search in China is Plastic flowerpot manufacturer...
http://www.accoona.com/about/press/press_release_
Yes, it ranks above emmigration!!!!
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
This post has been removed by the United States Department of Homeland Security. Revelation of its original contents is a violation of DHS regulations. Violators will be fined, imprisoned, or both.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
This makes it sound like all the major news outlets were up in arms about it. In fact, a quick check of Google news for "Massage Milk", sorted by date, shows that there was the BBC story on the 8th, then numerous reports about it being a hoax the next day.
The BBC article states:
(Emphasis mine.)
The WSJ article claims that the BBC updated its article, but it doesn't make clear what was updated. The few blogs that picked up the story seem to support the text I quoted above. Meaning, that the BBC was not unreasonable in its report, even if it did assume the worst.
As far as I can tell, the only irresponsible party here is the blogger himself. He created a situation that directly insinutated government shutdown, then tried to play the matter up as "irresponsible western journalism." He's proved nothing except to do damage to the free speech movement in China.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Yes, the "Western" media does get many issues wrong, so I am in no way defending their every aspect...but come on. I mean, if two Chinese-based blogs are "shut down," what does one usually think? I doubt you can just call Bejing and get a straight answer from the govt. people, so it does not seem wholly irresponsible in my view to assume that the govt. did in fact shut them down.
Also, maybe I am an idiot, but I would rather have a (relatively) free press who get things wrong from time to time to a govt. which muzzles just about everything. Call me crazy I suppose. I wouldn't be surprised if the Chinese govt. backed this project in the first place.
Heh, heh, maybe the freedom to be irresponsible on occasion is part of the whole point (and risk) of a free press. After all, once the truth was known, the story was corrected. I'm not so sure that mistakes would be corrected with a less than free press. It's funny, many seem to think that freedom means making the right choices all of the time. But in fact most of the time it means screwing up and falling flat on your face whether that be choosing the wrong party or president to lead your country or just choosing an SUV with really bad gas mileage. What governments and societies around the world need to come to grips with is allowing people the freedom screw up. There can be no success without the risk of failure.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Chinese affairs are not always the way you think
This is bullshit. Respect of the human dignity and free will of a Chineese person is just as important as the respect of human dignity and free will of an American one. The notion that rights are opinions and mutual agreements worked out with a government died over 200 years ago. Today it is widely understood that individuals have rights with or without government, and that those rights are inaliable, and that the puspose of government is to help secure those rights. If the government can't do it, then it is a failure - plain and simple. This isn't rocket science, the history of rights has been well tested out and is only misunderstood by those who would want to ignore it and abuse it.
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
Yeah right. The guy intentionally feeds incorrect information to the outside world, then blames everyone for interpreting it incorrectly? Great logic skills, buddy.
Given his statement, apparently all of those censorship and freedom of speech problems don't exist. Move along, nothing to see here.
They're just ticked off because The Onion keeps fooling them.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
[Sarcasm] Wow they fooled the Media. I never thought i'd see the day where the media would report some sensationlist news without checking the facts out. This is a sad day indeed. [/sarcasm]
~Should i be worried when the real world starts lagging?
He's collaborating with those who try to suppress it.
We have a fable about a little boy who cried wolf as a prak one too many times. When there really was a wolf and he was in need, no one believed him. When your site is really taken down by the Chinese Government, don't be surprised when we don't believe you.
"Knee Jerk" is exactly the expression I would use in describing much of western media's reporting on China. I feel funny even having to say this, but China is a huge country with a complex society. The naive precept of a bipolar China with an evil communist government vs. the people is just that: naive. Speculating government suppresion in any social incidents is as "knee jerky" as pointing to the Bush administration whenever a car accident happens in America. By reporting based on speculative instincts rather than facts and objective analysis, the western media has been DETRIMENTAL, rather than helpful, to the free speech movement in China. Reporting like this one and others have dis-credited the western media and alienated even disgusted much of the Chinese people (not the government). It's no wonder there has been a serious backlash in China's cyber free speech movement in recent few years. I'm sure at this very moment the Chinese Minister of Central Propaganda is laughing his rear end off reading this column.
Here's your evidence. This lady is a VA nurse who wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper about how poorly Bush has been handling the Iraq war and huricane Katrina.
http://www.alternet.org/rights/33027/
She's been under investigation by the FBI since then, and they're threatening to throw her in jail on sedition charges. They've been using scare tactics like interrupting her in the middle of her work at the hospital and confiscating her work computer "to look for evidence".
The future is arriving faster than you think.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
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."
This isn't a personal dig as it applies to pretty much everybody these days, but with all due respect the government of China really isn't very communist. Neither was the Soviet Union's or North Korea. It's a side issue to the debate here, but read Marx and then tell me that it's part of a communist system of government to censor blogs (or have public executions, or systematically starve whole regions etc etc). These types of governments may try to convince their people that they're living in a communist paradise where everyone's enlightened and equal, but let's not fall for the idea in the west too.
Don't dupe yourself -- America is a fascist state, and has been for some time now. It probably started around Clinton's time, although Dubya has worked hard to try and outdo him.
Does he/she live in Europe? Its a good question.
Serious questions not meant as flamebait:
In which country do you now live?
Why does your family no longer live in China?
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
Read carefully. Wang's note merely said: "Because of unavoidable reasons, this blog is now temporarily closed". Which part of "unavoidable reasons" sounds like either wolf or government suppresion? Websites and Blogs shut down temporarily everyday. Virus attacks, unscheduled maintenance, power outage, datacenter problem, hardware issues, even natural disasters... In recent memory, even multinational giant sites such as Yahoo, MSN became "temporarily unavailable" several times. Why does "unavoidable reasons" have to be government suppresion in this case? Now read the BBC report again. The first sentence in the report claims Wang "has been closed down by the authorities". Obviously SOMEONE jumped into a conclusion. The tendency to make a judgement without corroborative facts, is the definition of BIAS. A biased wester media that doesn't do its homework lacks credibility, and biased reporting does not help promoting democracy or freedom of speech, instead it helps build the Chinese government's argument that the west media is irresponsible. At the end of the day, that's the point Wang's prank tries to make. For those capable of thinking independently, without the divine guidance from the "mainstream media", then consider again who cried wolf, Wang or the media?
The situation is far more complicated there than 'Maoist bad' etc. The Maoist rebels need to be considered in relation to what they stand in opposition to - the brutal dictatorship under the current king of Nepal. It's no coincidence that at this point, the major political parties in Nepal are siding with the Maoists.
Furthermore, the death toll analysis is not very reliable. For example, much of the death in the GLF was from incompetence and lack of control, rather than authoritarian actions. The Cultural Revolution, meanwhile, was not a centrally organised disaster, but of self igniting fanaticism. And so on and so forth.
While it is easy to make such lists, it is more valuable to look at what connects them - and what connects them has little to do with communism itself - Marx never espoused a dictatorship. What made these cases arise is the raising to high station of an insignificant, paranoid peasant warlord, who becomes obsessed with delusions of self-grandeur. The above sort of thing is not restricted to communism, but occurs in any case where a hated government is removed suddenly by a rebel movement, which then finds itself surrounded by external enemies and half-imagined, half-real remnants of the deposed force. Non-communist examples involve the Taliban, Nazi Germany, the Rwandan massacres, post-Soviet Russia, Saddam-era Iraq......
You're a bit behinds the times.
It is no longer difficult to arrange oversea trips or immigration AS LONG AS YOU HAVE SOME MONEY.
Those hiding in the container cargo are doing so because they could not get a legal visa to enter the USA!
While it used to be the case where many graduate students from China choose to stay in the US. Now a days, there are many who have returned to China due to greater work opportunities. Of course, this applies to those with applicable education or a head for business. Those who are sneaking into the US tend to have less education and fewer opportunities there.