Op-Ed Contributors

Distorting truth with biased perspective

By Mo Nong (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-03-24 07:58

Providing accurate and reliable information of any event or incident is the very basic requirement for individual journalists and news organizations. And Western media organizations have long claimed that this is what they provide.

Yet, when we look at the wrong or modified photos used by some overseas news organizations in reports that tried to convince readers that social unrest took place in China, we cannot but doubt they have double standards when it comes to reporting news about countries such as China.

Some Western papers and websites made up stories about how Chinese people staged large-scale demonstrations or protests demanding freedom and democracy.

The ALO News website in the United States released a report titled "Chinese in the jasmine revolution demand freedom of speech". The report went on to say that 50 policemen defended the government building against protesters, who threw paper-planes printed with the design of jasmine flowers at the police. The photo it used to accompany the story is actually of the demonstration Beijing residents staged against Japanese distortion of history in school textbooks in 2005.

Another website used a photo about Taiwan separatists protesting against mainland official Chen Yunlin's visit to Taiwan to illustrate how Chinese residents gathered to protest against the government. The German Noows website reported that a "jasmine revolution" broke out in many cities on the Chinese mainland and it used a photo of a Chinese armed police training session claiming it showed protesters confronting the police.

What is even funnier is that L'essentiel's website in Luxembourg even used a photo, in which Hong Kong policemen were just maintaining public order on a Hong Kong street for its report. Some papers in Taiwan did the same.

All this shows that these news organizations did not have any first-hand information about the events they were reporting, but they wanted such events to occur in China.

It recalls the remark of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels that a lie repeated a thousand times will become the truth. Perhaps they hoped by using the photos in such a way they might be able to provoke some Chinese citizens into taking to the streets.

If that is the case they were mistaken. China has witnessed remarkably fast economic growth in the past three decades and many of its people have progressed from leading a hand-to-mouth existence in the late 1970s to enjoying a moderately well off life now.

People should be clear that chaos in China won't do Chinese people any good, and neither will it do any good to the rest of the world. Anyone who believes that chaos will change China from what it is today to what some Westerners expect it to be is being naive. They know too little about China and its people.

China's political system is different from that of Western countries. Yes, our political system has problems, but so too does the Western political system.