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"Pay close attention to that man behind the curtain!"

Sunday, March 22, 2009

China Post ignores its own reporting

Not good enough for a dime store

Before I get to a recent example of deception found in the China Post, I should inform readers of the truth -- something which even that very paper reported back on July 7, 2004:
"Since I neither rigged the vote nor faked the shooting, I am not afraid of independent probes into the shooting, just as I did not fear a vote recount," Chen [former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁)] said.
Exactly.

But before you get the wrong idea about the China Post's journalistic integrity, I should also point out some questionable content from the same article:
Chen was reelected on the following day, thanks to sympathy votes, with a paper-thin margin of 0.2 percent.

[...]

According to the police report, the suspect bore a personal grudge against Chen as he could not sell his apartment because of the economic downturn Chen induced during his term in office. [Maddog note: With the economy being what it is during Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) president Ma Ying-jeou's (馬英九) first term, how can they even bring this up?] A New York Times reporter described the police report as one ounce found in a dime store novel. [Maddog note: That would be Keith Bradsher.]
A big chunk of that section is not fact-based. (Note how the China Post mangles the already-melodramatic Bradsher quote as well, which originally said that police were "Spinning the sort of story once found in dime store novels...")

But let's focus once again on the part of the article which quoted Chen saying in 2004 that he was "not afraid of independent probes into the shooting." I would like to ask readers to contrast that quote with this deceptive nonsense from the Friday, March 20, 2009 edition of the same paper:
Former President Chen Shui-bian, who was vehemently opposed to the investigation into the mystery-shrouded shooting in Tainan five years ago yesterday, now wishes that a new probe would be launched to find out the truth.
Do the editors at the China Post not read their own paper?

Or do they merely hope the public will rely on them to accurately provide such details instead of looking these details up themselves?

More of what they're not telling you
The China Post only hints at what Chen actually opposed -- the unconstitutional, pan-blue-dominated "319 Truth Commission" (319 槍擊事件真相調查特別委員會) (MORE: 1, 2, 3). The China Post also won't tell readers that now-Minister of Justice Wang Ching-feng (王清峰) once told a reporter that the commission didn't have the money to come up with any evidence (yet the commission drew assumption-based conclusions anyway).

To get an even clearer picture of where the China Post takes its cues from, note how the 2005 article repeats that zombie lie about "sympathy votes." Here's a sentence from the KMT produced propaganda pamphlet known as "Bulletgate" (子彈門):
The mysterious shots caused a groundswell of sympathy votes for the pan-green ticket.
Can you spot the source of this so-called "mystery"? I knew that you could.
Shrouds of mystery: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Cross-posted at Taiwan Matters!

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