Slashdot Mirror
China to Control Reports of Foreign News Agencies
afa writes "According to Xinhuanet.com, Xinhua News Agency on Sunday promulgated a set of measures to regulate the release of news and information in China by foreign news agencies. From the article: 'Where a foreign news agency violates the Measures in one of the following manners, Xinhua News Agency shall give it a warning, demand rectification within a prescribed time limit, suspend its release of specified content, suspend or cancel its qualifications of a foreign news agency for releasing news and information in China, on the merits of each case.'"
As someone who is in China, I read the English version of the "China Daily" as often as it is delivered to me.
This is a paper you would be within your rights to class as an "official English newspaper" from the Chinese government.
But guess what?
It contains mistakes. The reports found within, if they are the official story, are erroneous.
As alarming as it may be that the Chinese Government is trying to control what foreign publications publish in China, what is of greater concern is the dubious accuracy of their own reporting.
A case in point is a recent *front page* story on a lake where all of the fish died. The story in the paper ran with the excuse of the water temperature dropping from 40C down to 20C. If you do some research on oxygenation of water, you will find that the opposite is true: a lower water temperature holds more oxygen. Which then leads you to wonder, what really happened? (Most likely the continued hot weather caused the water to become too hot and the fish were going to die whether the temperature dropped or not.)
This is not an isolated incident in the reports I read of the English version of "China daily".
Until the Chinese can get the facts and figures straight/correct, punishing outside news agencies for reporting something differently than the "official story" is ridiculous.
FWIW, if you watch CNN, on the weekend they ran a story about 30 years after Mao's death. In China this was shown up until the point of where it started to show black and white film.