"To mark the No Bra Day, volunteers call the public to pay attention to the breast health in Chengdu, southwest China's Sichuan province on July 9, 2015. Research indicates that wearing bra may increase the risks of getting breast cancer for a woman."
People's Daily deserves not our scorn but our patience and understanding. I make the comparison with autism with absolutely no intention of being insulting to autistic people or their family and friends, and please accept my apologies if this still sounds offensive. But maybe the proper response to People's Daily -- which has underdeveloped communication skills (despite being the official mouthpiece of the government), difficulty grasping abstract concepts, and fantasies that are simply untenable in the real world -- should be with tolerance, composure, and encouragement?
People's Daily has had an eventful week. Last Monday it called the New York Times "circling vultures" for an article on Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370; on Friday it sought "immediate rectification" from a parody Twitter account, @relevantorgans; then, somehow, it got a guest editorial out of Bill Gates. But PD truly tops itself with this next thing, because these are words that someone actually wrote. Via Reuters:
People's Daily, the gift that keeps on giving, did a most glorious thing at 1:39 am today by "publicly condemn[ing]" a parody Twitter account, The Relevant Organs. "We have noticed that a Twitter account has been misleading people by stealing People's Daily 's web address and National emblem of China to make false impression that the account is related to China officials or People's Daily," reads PD's tweeted statement.
On April 14, New York Times reporters Kirk Semple and Eric Schmitt published an article titled “China’s Actions in Hunt for Jet Are Seen as Hurting as Much as Helping" that quoted two government officials -- one from the US and one from Malaysia, both unnamed -- who said China has not, to put it nicely, contributed much to the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370. It was a disturbing piece, not least because it seemed to signal the search may have entered a new phase in which the frustrations and difficulties of finding the missing jet could spill into finger-pointing and politics.
First, we need to collectively realize -- then get over the fact that -- People's Daily has a Facebook page. Then we can get to this story, first tweeted by Bill Bishop with the question, "People's Daily fall for fake news again?"
Turns out, yes. Very fake.
The news here is not that People's Daily did something ridiculous, because they do that all the time. It's the netizen response.
But before we get there, let's set the scene first with People's Daily's ridiculousness:
There's phallic -- the Washington Monument, skyscrapers, ice cream drumsticks -- and then there's penis. Behold the above, purportedly the new headquarters of People's Daily. As Hug China explains:
Pictures of the People’s Daily new headquarters that is under furnishing at the moment have gone viral on Chinese social media. One of the picture taken by a netizen from a special angle on April 11 when the top part of the building was framed with construction racks makes the construction look like a colossal human male genital.
Are you healthy? Are your parents alive? If you answered in the affirmative to these two questions, you’re well on your way toward being happy currently, as a fun little People’s Daily quiz tells us. But like a bad dictionary entry in which the word you’re looking up is used in the definition, some answers are... Read more »
