The original centerpiece of the so-called Chinese netizens' campaign against the Western media was the website anti-cnn.com. I have been severely critical of the movement because I believe the claims made by the group far exceeded their evidence. It's a pattern which has been repeated in the Chinese blogosophere where one unsubstantiated claim after another is now being leveled against individuals, culminating in vicious personal attacks against Grace Wang, foreign journalists, and a Chinese newspaper editor. Chinese netizen attacks have recently been launched against France and its largest retailer.
Now, a German student has decided to fact-check the evidence supplied by the anti-CNN bloggers; the material that fueled accusations that first ignited the Chinese netizens. It seems not only -- as I have long maintained -- was their evidence inconclusive, the German student shows they misrepresented some facts. He examines anti-CNN's clippings from Der Spiegel and CNN and shows them to have been "cropped" and even "mislabeled." Sound familiar? His interesting expose of the anti-CNN group is a website called I Love China.
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See also this post.
Excellent find. Thank you for pointing this out!
ReplyDeleteHi, jotman, thanks for your post. i read 'i love china' you recommended,
ReplyDeleteAs to Spiegel, i don't speak german so i never read the original report (I still cannot find the original one), and because my computer has some problems with german, so i cannot find out the exact german words so i can use google translation to see what it really means. But i put it on anti-cnn and hope anyone can respond to this.
As to cnn, oh, we have gone through this several times, there is a reply to cnn's reply about its cropped figure on anti-cnn. As for me,I read the original report, but i didn't pay attention to the figure description and the original one cannot be found, so i put it on anti-cnn too, see if anyone have a copy of this report.
My opinions are simple:
1. If Spiegel thing is true, anti-cnn must correct its translation.
2. Crop the caption of the figure by cnn--wrong! (though i doubt the caption would actually say)Crop the figure although ann claims they did that for some editorial reason, sorry, i cannot be convinced, i still doubt they cropped it deliberately.
3. The issue here is whether the western media is misleading/distorted or not. I understand that different people will have opposite opinions on it, so why not just look at the outcome of the media report? If most people can get the fact from the media(correct me if i am not): The peaceful protests(before 3.14) went to riot, innocent people got killed and there is no substantial evidence that the chinese government cracked down the protestors with crule act.
if most people can get this, ok, there is absoutely no misleading/distorted information at all.
The reason why i put my opinions here is that jottman seems have a problem with the so-called chinese netizens and unfortunely i am one of them... :-)
It seems that 'i love china' believes that the journalists are open-minded, try to report two sides of story as possible as they can and let their readers make their own judgements. well, i certainly don't think so, i think all people are biased, no matter how hard they try not to be influenced by the outside world, no matter how professional they are(or they think they are), and that is why i prefer debates on the internet.
BTW,' i love china 'says '...I only know that in Tibet are very angry and young minority men running around who do violence andeven kill humans. There should be a big discussions in Chinese Newsgroups what gone wrong in politics that this is happening now. But instead of this the big discussion is about (wrong translated) picture descriptions in foreign press and so on. Chinese people are yelling that they love their country and "splash mud" on western news media on demonstrations in Duesseldorf (Germany) and elsewhere.'
I believe that no chinese will discuss any topic with another chinese in english or german, so there is no need to say more about there is no discussion about the people in xizang. And also, if there is no biased information towards china, why the students in Duesseldorf hold the demonstrations, maybe just because they have too much time to kill besides their study?
I would like to see all the videos/reports on anti-cnn to be fact-checked.
I would like to see all the videos/reports on anti-cnn to be fact-checked.
ReplyDeleteSome further points to consider:
http://jotman.blogspot.com/2008/04/did-western-media-bias-spark-chinese.html