Via Austin Ramzy of Time, here's Beijing Evening News’s photoshopped picture of a dog pissing on a car. The title of the article, as if it matters at all, is, "No harm to tires; still, don't let it 'go' wherever it wants." It's about dogs peeing on tires. That picture, however, says so much more, does it not? ...

The "falling for satire" bit is our little extrapolation, but what other funny way to explain this? Via SCMP: "All kinds of media work units may not use any unauthorised news products provided by foreign media or foreign websites," according to a notice issued by the General Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television. This came on the heels of David Barboza winning a Pulitzer for his W ...

Just about anyone not holding a select diplomatic or South Korean passport can travel to North Korea. All it takes is money, which you give to a tour agency. They'll even take you to the countryside if that's what you're after. It's only the hucksters who try to dress up their North Korean trip as an accomplishment, pretending it involved wile or subterfuge, not to mention danger. When a reporter does it -- ...

David Barboza's expose on the extent of Wen Jiabao's family's "hidden riches" has won him a Putlizer. He beat out the Associated Press for its coverage in Syria and Richard Marosi of the Los Angeles Times for his work on deportation of Mexican immigrants. ...

The lovably gullible editors at 21st Century Business Herald must really hate the genre of satire now. Just last month, this Guangzhou-based business weekly, one of the largest in the country, fell for a spoof on the website The Daily Currant claiming that Paul Krugman had gone backrupt. Very recently, they bit the bait again, this time dangled by The Borowitz Report. ...

Congratulations go out to The Daily Currant, whose "Paul Krugman Declares Personal Bankruptcy" piece on March 6 has found its way across the world to net one hell of a big, clueless fish. They're not the only one to fall for it, but Guangzhou-based 21st Century Business Herald, one of the country's top business publications, should have known better. We just hope, for its sake, that the reporters and editor ...

The Foreign Correspondents Club of China recently got wind of an assault on a German TV crew yesterday in Hebei province and published this statement: The crew, belonging to ARD television, narrowly avoided serious injury when two men attacked their vehicle with baseball bats, shattering the windscreen, after a high speed chase down a major highway near the city of Sanhe, 50 km east of Beijing. Whoa, high-s ...

A maraschino cherry has just been dropped into the Long Island iced tea of the China blogosphere, as Asia Society officially launched its new blog, ChinaFile, on Tuesday. The occasion was highlighted by a panel discussion in New York moderated by legendary China hand Orville Schell, featuring New York Times correspondents of past and present: Seymour Topping (who covered the Chinese civil war), Fox Butterfi ...

Do journalists in China really face a tougher environment than Vietnam, Cuba, Sudan, Yemen, Laos? According to the French non-profit Reporters Without Borders (RSF), yes. China (173rd, +1) shows no sign of improving. Its prisons still hold many journalists and netizens, while increasingly unpopular Internet censorship continues to be a major obstacle to access to information. In its downloadable report, RSF ...

In a December interview on a Phoenix TV talk show, Jackie Chan made comments that Western media have recently described as "anti-American" -- ...really? I think his comments regarding America are immature, but they're not without reason. What a lot of reporting has ignored is that Chan was speaking in Chinese on a Chinese television channel, and the message he was delivering to a Chinese audience was this: ...

Foreign commissioning editors get a lot of pitches like this: "The Chinese are now watching Homeland / eating caviar / behaving like us." These activities usually owe to the fact that a few ultra-wealthy Chinese have found some new, pointlessly expensive Western habit -- like high-end gold hi-fi aficionado clubs, or bottles of purified Moon water with powdered diamante -- and taken them up. The reasons behi ...

The Central Propaganda Department can force papers to run their government-line editorials, but even with the power vested in them by the Party, it can't determine where those op-eds appear. Like, say, next to a humongous ad for pesticide control. ...

It began as a strongly worded letter. When journalists at the Guangdong daily paper Southern Weekly returned to work on Thursday to find a section had been altered by a propagandist -- headline changed, article replaced -- they published an open letter demanding "an investigation into the incident." They named names, in particular accusing Guangdong propaganda chief Tuo Zhen of editorial hijacking. The lett ...

People's Daily Online is openly soliciting feedback for China's English-language newspapers, using language that doesn't even try to conceal the fact that papers such as China Daily and Global Times might be affiliated with the government. This is the shocking part, of course. Those of us familiar with China know how complicated the media environment here is, and put up with government editorials (i.e. igno ...

New York Times correspondent Chris Buckley, 45, who has worked in China since September 2000, formerly with Reuters, was denied a visa renewal and is now off the mainland. As NYT reports: “I regret that Chris Buckley has been forced to relocate outside of China despite our repeated requests to renew his journalist visa,” Jill Abramson, the executive editor of The Times, said in the statement. “I hope the Ch ...

Earlier this year, I gave a lecture to high school journalism students in China about the importance of citation, spending a good 10 minutes on the how and why of it. This may or may not surprise you, depending on whether you read Chinese publications and/or crappy blogs, but sourcing is often optional here; what's already been published is considered in the public domain, as incontrovertibly factual as, sa ...

This story just gets more interesting by the minute. Via @fightcensorship, we've learned that Andrea Yu will be appearing on the cover of the November 16 issue of Oriental BQ Weekly Magazine. The red letters read: "Australia watches the 18th National Congress," and on the second line, "Andi," which is the Chinese rendering of Andrea. "Hodgkinson" is Yu's real (given?) surname. On Global CAMG Media Group's o ...

Yesterday, while writing about an Australian reporter who had become somewhat of a Chinese Internet star because of her Mandarin-speaking ability, I was most struck by something she said in English. At a press conference inside the Great Hall of the People, she mentioned she was representing "Global CAMG Media International." I googled that phrase and found no results on the first page. The closest match wa ...

This interview never gets off on the right foot: the lag between the anchor and the reporter is a full five seconds, causing the anchor to make a "Why haven't you acknowledged my greeting?" face. Reporter Feng Yuxian, live from Dubai (that's the Dubai Tower Burj Al-Arab Hotel in the background), then delivers her correspondence in fits and starts, stumbling over several lines. We feel bad for her because sh ...

Venerable titans of journalism, People's Daily, published an attack piece on the New York Times yesterday (in Chinese) accusing the Gray Lady of deteriorating standards and bad breath. "In recent years, there has been an explosion in plagiarism and fabrication by its journalists," PD writes, highlighting two particular debacles involving infamous plagiarists Jayson Blair and Zachery Kouwe. Financial Times n ...