Ways That Are Dark

This is a short follow up on the Chinese government’s directive to local media that all news must be good news. The new rules are adding more pressure to the already challenging job of copying and pasting articles from Reuters.

The task is not always easy, as one episode showed during ceremonies Aug. 8 marking the one-year countdown to the Beijing Games.

The government-run China Daily ran an item on its Web site that evening pointing out that the site of the festivities, Tiananmen Square, was also the place where in 1989 the People’s Liberation Army crushed pro-democracy demonstrators, killing many. The item — true but touching on a subject banned from Chinese newspapers — was taken down the next morning and an investigation was launched. The author, colleagues said, had lifted the sentence directly from the Reuters news agency in a copy-and-paste maneuver common in Chinese journalism.

The offending journalist was suspended without pay for a month and fined the equivalent of $133, they said.

The above cut and pasted from The Washington Post article: Chinese Media Told to Play Up Positives of Traffic Test.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 19th, 2007 at 8:23 pm and is filed under Funny Stories, Press Freedom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.