“A fair few were drunks, philanderers and frauds and more than one was a spy,” writes Paul French in Through the Looking Glass, a book about China’s foreign correspondents from the Opium Wars to Mao. “They changed sides, they lost their impartiality, they displayed bias and a few were downright scoundrels and lairs of the first order.”
And like so, French also neatly articulates exactly what Xinhua thinks of today’s foreign correspondents: scoundrels and liars, all of them, who crane their parched throats and bat chapped lips at the teats of the CCP, happy for nubbins of detail, morsels of data, a mere whiff of that divine scoop.
To Xinhua, as titular an organization as you’ll find (emphasis on tit), foreign correspondents deserve scraps and nothing more. And you’ll be happy about it, you philandering drunks! Which, we think, is why they announced Bo Xilai’s criminal charges and the date of the National Congress on a Friday evening before a major holiday. Foreign correspondents weren’t too happy about that. But hey, what are they gonna do? Tweet about it?
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Ha nice piece
John Chin~ <3
The analogy at the start, and the tweets, coupled with the current situation remind me a little of C. J. Koch’s “The year of living dangerously”. Isn’t there a bit of biting the hand that feeds in these off-the-cuff (albeit hilarious) comments?
It wasn’t just foreign correspondents who were pissed off at the timing At the SARFT mothership China Radio Intl, chinese staff were steaming as well. Like Global Times and China Daily mostly, CRI is not allowed to generate any “real” news on its own and has to depend on Skinyua to kick start it.
Huge headaches and sudden last minute conferences still going on at 9pm for folks who’d had to miss flights and trains for Super Golden Week.
Hey..but news and shit happens.
typical journalists, assuming the timing of the news was somehow connected to them.