People's Daily acknowledges 1989 in 2004. (click for full-size)
As reported on
ESWN and widely mocked elsewhere, the
China Daily website slipped up when it reposted a Reuters article in full, not noticing that it referenced certain sensitive events from 1989.
We can't say that we're surprised. Not because the China Daily website has a reputation for blind copy-and-paste journalism (though it does), but because it did exactly the same thing back in 2004, when it reposted an AP obituary of Anita Mui that closed with a mention of the pop star's work with a Tiananmen-related charity.
In that case, as in the present one, the full story was shared with the People's Daily website and stayed up for between 12 and 24 hours before being cleansed.
Reports on this latest goof, which included lavishly illustrated spreads in Hong Kong newspapers, tended to use headlines like "China Daily acknowledges history." However, blame for the mixup rests with the website, not the print newspaper. If I were the China Daily, I'd be pretty ticked off at the website for continually dragging my good name through the mud. The peculiar editorial process at the Xinhua website has been chronicled elsewhere, and from the frequency with which screw-ups and plagiarism occur at other official English-language online media, we can only assume that the procedures are the same.
So having a perpetual "China Daily Plagiarism watch", "China Daily asleep-at-the-switch watch", "China Daily babewatch" or even a "Chinglish watch" quickly becomes tiresome. It's fun to play "gotcha" once in a while, but pointing out each and every instance is sort of like, oh, running a tank back and forth over a pig carcass. This was an especially satisfying catch, however, and we look forward to the next one in 2010.
Read the complete post at http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/DanweiRss10/~3/144344896/copypaste_lessons_unlearned.php
Posted
Aug 15 2007, 03:40 AM
by
Danwei - Media, Advertising, and Urban Life in China