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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
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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
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.
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.
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
They're just ticked off because The Onion keeps fooling them.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
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.
According to your link, she isn't being investigated for a crime, her bosses at the VA were pissed because she identified herself as a VA nurse in her letter, so on the order of their HR director, their IT guys took her work computer for a couple of days to see if she wrote the letter on company time and/or equipment. Her union told her that she was reported to the FBI, but no one from the VA or from the FBI seems to have told her that or confirmed it. She's certainly not being harrassed by the FBI, at least according to the article you cite she's never even spoked to the FBI, she just says she's worried that they "might" be watching her based on her personal stereotype of FBI agents.
Basically she wrote a letter to the editor identifying her job and then proceeded to publicly blast her employer as an employee. In the private sector, that'd probably get her fired. As a government employee, that's virtually impossible, so instead her bosses in the bureaucracy (who now look really bad to their bosses) are trying to make her life a little more miserable.
While I don't condone the screwed-up nature of the federal civil service bureaucracy, imagine the internal response if you had published a letter to the editor saying the CEO of your company was mismanaging several big aspects of the company and signed it with your name and job title. I'm pretty sure the response you'd get (if you worked at a large or small company) would dwarf the response she got from her bosses.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.