I’m seldom so glad to say we’ve been here before.
It’s been another embarrassing 24 hours for Xinhua, a major Chinese state-run media outlet. Two more stories slipped though the nets into the paper yesterday, and I love when satire and absurd misuse of photos makes it into the official media here. When life gives us the lemons of restricted media, it also gives us the lemonade of human beings making mistakes and letting things through.
The Borowitz Report is a satirical column that oftentimes creates confusion because of its parent site, The New Yorker, is believed to generally be a respectable source. Anyone who goes on autopilot might miss the satire. Anyone who is not a native speaker might easily do so as well.
Thus, we did indeed see a reprint of an article about Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com and the new owner of the Washington Post, purchasing the Post by mistake. I like the idea of having a $250 million charge come up on your American Express card and having no idea where it came from.
I guess this is the difference between online shopping in China and in America, because if I paid for a defective or unwanted product on Taobao (Chinese Amazon equivalent) then I would not even try to return it. I would probably forget about languishing in “please-hold-your-call-is-being-processed” hell and simply remark how amazing it is to get free shipping on orders over $5.
The second mixup is a little bit NSFW (for my parents, if you even read this blog, that means “Not Safe For Work.”). In an attempt to depict the disgusting conditions and treatment of inmates in American prison who are being executed, state media dug up pictures of a female inmate being executed.
The images were shocking and inappropriate. The only problem? They were screenshots from a fetish porn video.
I can only imagine that this mistake is the result of news employees strictly adhering to the law in China, where pornography is technically illegal. They simply didn’t know!
This is in stark contrast to America, where in 1964 the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Potter Stewart, was so sure in his ability to spot lewd content he famously quipped “I know it when I see it” to provide a formal description of what counted as pornography.
But don’t put this one in the win column for America just yet. To many people around the world, the idea of China calling out America on criminal justice is insane on both sides of the coin. China, obviously, has nothing to brag about when it comes to treatment of criminals in their country, but comparing themselves as “better than the US” when it comes to executions isn’t a very strong argument. The US and China are the two largest countries in the world that still use capital punishment, considered abhorrent by many other developed nations. So to the eyes of a European viewer, this whole affair might be likened to a blind man berating another blind man for not seeing well enough, when actually he is even more blind himself.
I can only hope that the government censors who brought us the fabulousness of Sexy Kim Jong-Un and TOP GUN continue their hard work in the future, in service of the people!
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