Accuracy should come before politics in reporting on China
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[By Liu Rui/Global Times] |
Some foreign media often report false news about China.
In 2008, some separatists rioted, burned property, looted and killed people on the street in Lhasa, Tibet. When CNN and other Western media reported on the unrest, they cropped the photos of the scene and intentionally confused the facts.
This remains fresh in people's minds. Nowadays such tricks have been used again by the Agence France Presse (AFP) and other foreign media.
Netizens have exposed as fakes some photos of the "Jasmine Revolution" in China, including clashes between protesters and policemen, published recently in some foreign media.
Some of them were photos of Chinese anti-Japanese protests several years ago, and some were taken in February when some Taiwanese independence activists protested against the visit to Taiwan by Chen Yunlin, chairman of the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits.
Photos of workers looking for jobs in domestic labor markets were even used to make up the number. People in these photos are upset and angry, which delivers the urgent message that China has been Egyptianized.
This is the China that those journalists with bad professional ethics want to see, but such kind of China does not exist, so they have to piece together different photos, search on Internet and affix forcibly the photos of large crowds with Chinese-looking faces.
These Western media think that using French, English, Norwegian or traditional Chinese characters to caption these photos will make them convincing, but they are exposed by Chinese netizens in the end.
Why are these forgers so bold and careless?
Frankly speaking, Western society, which is always picky about news facts, lays more emphasis on politics when talking about China. False stories about China attract less negative attention than defending China does.
Reports about China by the Western media are full of prejudice and spite, which leads to the biased topics of these reports. The Western media does most reports from a presupposed attitude and these reports describe a strange, closed and virulent China. From the macro-perspective, some Western media joins up to tell big lies about China.
In its most open period with the most rapid development, China has come under uncommon criticism by the Western press.
Western society shows much more dislike for China now than in the 1970s before the reform and opening-up process began. It seems that everything China does is wrong and the 1.3 billion people of China are treated as a stupid group fooled by a repressive regime.
The problems in China are certainly large, because China is like a big ship that plans to voyage to the deep sea. However, although Chinese civilization has existed for thousands of years, Chinese can still understand the letters written by our forefathers in the Qin (221BC–206BC) and Han (206BC–220AD) dynasties. Claims about the collapse of China should not be frequently used in the reports of the Western media.
We are more willing to listen to pertinent criticisms of China, instead of unfair comments. But Internet users in China are good at different languages. They pay great attention to politics and are fond of debating and supervising. So it is rare that a Western report that starts a false rumor about China is not exposed.
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