Thursday, April 19, 2007
Fallows on Virginia Tech and the Chinese media
James Fallows has an interesting post at the HuffPo that traces the geopolitical impact of a single erroneous report by a Chicago Sun-Times columnist, Michael Sneed. Sneed erroneously reported very early that the Virginia Tech killer was Chinese. Fox and some local news outlets picked up on the story, and the rest was, well, predictable:
What the Chinese media did next was bad in a predictable way. Many web links to outside news of the shooting were blocked to limit subsequent details from reaching China. As reported in this blog from Beijing, parts of CCTV and the other official news outlets downplayed all announcements about the shooting until they could be sure what the "correct" Chinese angle would turn out to be. Meanwhile some other Chinese press web sites reported the news -- and the suspicion, emanating from America, that the killer was Chinese. I have friends in the U.S. consulate here, and I could imagine them tearing through the visa records yesterday, trying to figure out who the student might posibly have been, and which consular officer had stamped Approved! on his papers.
Why all this flurry, over a suspect who proved to have nothing to do with the Shanghai consulate or China at all? As best I can tell, the alarm in the world's most populous nation was caused by one person, the (female) columnist Michael Sneed of the Chicago Sun Times...
All interesting stuff, lessons about our interconnected world and such. But then Fallows twists the story into a bizarre "lesson":
Meanwhile it was striking through the day that no "real" news source stepped up to confirm Sneed's report. (The ones who passed it along were Drudge and Fox.) But eventually the Chinese started to assume that it must be true. Otherwise, how could an American journalist dare go public, fast and alone, with a detailed claim sure to cause international ripples?
How indeed? It turns out the "normal" media were right to wait; that every detail of Sneed's story about the Chinese culprit was wrong; and that something went wrong in the basic journalistic process here....
1.3 billion Chinese people are grateful to you, Michael Sneed -- grateful the alarm created singlehandedly by you proved false. They hold endless seminars on media ethics here, on the theory that this can help shape up a state-controlled press. Maybe you'd like to come speak? I guarantee you'd draw a crowd.
I think that James Fallows is an extremely good journalist, but this is asinine. The Sneed incident it is hardly a question of journalistic ethics. Sneed was reporting on a crime, and reported the ethnicity of the suspect according to rumors she had heard. She said he was Chinese, he turned out to be Korean. This is like saying that a suspect is believed to be Argentinian and have him turn out to be Brazilian. If this is the sort of error that counts as an ethical lapse in James Fallows' world, then we all need to scrutinize the pages of The Atlantic more closely. Even that exercise would be unfair, since that magazine hardly operates in the competitive business of reporting news. It goes to bed days or weeks before it hits the newsstands. Unlike news, The Atlantic's content robustly survives the passage of time instead of decaying into irrelevance, so its editors have vastly more time than any newspaper to confirm alleged facts.
Now, Fallows is apparently in China, and no doubt feels the Chinese reaction acutely. Fair enough, but who is responsible for the Chinese reaction? The sole American columnist who reported a fundamentally harmless rumor, the few American media organizations who passed it along, or the "1.3 billion Chinese," who run a police state that prevents any market in ideas and who (apparently) responded with a parochialism that makes the dumbest American rube look cosmopolitan?
C'mon. If Sneed's mistake is unethical, or even unprofessional, then there is hardly an ethical or professional newspaper reporter in the Western world.
5 Comments:
By 
Gordon Smith, at
Thu Apr 19, 08:03:00 AM:
I contrast this post with the one about the UN below.
The journalistic ethics of reporting that the VT shooter was Chinese not Korean aren't really in question. You're right. They reported a rumor in a feeding frenzy media without an ounce of restraint. Poor taste and bad reporting, yes. Unethical, no. It seems the reporter just wanted an excuse to go after Fox News and Drudge. They're both worth going after, but there are other, more plausible ways of singling them out.
Your post below references an anonymous quote from "A UN official", and you quickly use it to impugn the entire body. Unethical? Poor taste? Either way it's clumsy and oafish.
I understand your reflexive need to bash the UN and defend Fox News, but I hope I can keep coming here for your more thoughtful posts.
By RandomThoughts, at
Thu Apr 19, 09:12:00 AM:
Ethics in the media? Are you kidding me?
By 
, at
Thu Apr 19, 10:01:00 AM:
Fallows is an arrogant tool and always has been.
Hoolie, wake up and join the rest of us in the real world - the UN is a disgraceful cesspool of parasitic bureaucrats and petty tyrants seething with anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. It is profoundly deserving of any criticism sent its way, no matter what some "UN official" says or doesn't say. If one of two people told me he believed in the tooth fairy and the other said he believed in the power of the UN to bring about positive change in the world, I'd have to conclude one of them was a dangerous fool.
By D.E. Cloutier, at
Thu Apr 19, 02:11:00 PM:
Early reports on breaking stories often have mistakes.
The business class and other college-educated individuals in China aren't unsophisticated. They know how to deal with propaganda. They have been dealing with propaganda all of their lives.
By Dawnfire82, at
Thu Apr 19, 05:25:00 PM:
Screwie, if you can't tell the difference between, "The organization that I work for said this," and "I'm going to report this rumor I heard as a fact in a hope to get a leg up on my competition", (*cough*Superdome*cough*) well, you fail at logic.
