Onion Parody of Luxury in Congress Lifted by Beijing Newspaper

[This may have just been a bad writer, but the sad thing is that this is indicative of the what's happening to certain journalists all over the world - they are becomming mouthpieces for the state. When they are told a coup has happened - by the State Dept - they swallow it and don't bother to investigate. It can have dangerous consequences.]

6.8.02
U.S. satire tricks Beijing paper
Satire fools Chinese paper
Daily steals, prints Onion article on plan for new Capitol

Henry Chu, Los Angeles Times Saturday, June 8, 2002

Beijing -- An embarrassing gaffe by China's usually staid state-run media has left a popular newspaper with onion on its face.

Readers of the Beijing Evening News, the capital's largest-circulation newspaper, learned this week that the U.S. Congress had threatened to move out of Washington unless a fancy new Capitol was built.

"If we want to stay competitive, we need to upgrade," House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, a Missouri Democrat, was quoted as saying. "Look at the British Parliament. Look at the Vatican. . . . Without modern facilities, they've been having big problems attracting top talent."

If a new building with more bathrooms and better parking wasn't erected, the article said, then U.S. lawmakers were prepared to pack up and move to Memphis, or Charlotte, N.C.

The story seems newsworthy enough. Trouble is, it was lifted straight from the Onion, the satirical "news" publication based in New York that has caused countless American readers to double over with laughter at its weekly spoofs on current events.

Its story on the Capitol appeared in its May 29 edition, alongside such headlines as "Sexual Tension Between Arafat, Sharon Reaches Breaking Point" and "Man Blames Hangover on Everything But How Much He Drank."

A writer for the Beijing Evening News apparently picked up the item from the Internet, reworked the opening paragraphs and submitted it to his editors, who then published it as a straight news story, without citing a source.

Yu Bin, the editor in charge of international news, acknowledged Thursday that he had no idea where the writer, Huang Ke, originally got the story. Yu said he would tell Huang to be more careful next time.

But he adamantly ruled out a correction and grew slightly obstreperous when pressed to comment on the article's lack of truth.

"How do you know whether or not we checked the source before we published the story?" Yu demanded in a phone interview. "How can you prove it's not correct?"

For the record, an aide to Gephardt said the congressman never made the remarks attributed to him.

And John Feehery, the spokesman for House Speaker Dennis Hastert, an Illinois Republican, said his boss never called the Capitol a "drafty old building . . . no longer suitable for a world-class legislative branch," as the Onion and the Beijing Evening News reported.

"He likes the Capitol just fine," Feehery said.

The Onion parody featured an architect's rendering of a proposed futuristic Capitol complete with a retractable dome, a "Dancing Waters fountain" and "55 more luxury boxes than the current building." The Evening News reproduced the entire illustration without crediting the Onion. There wasn't even a caption explaining what the drawing was.

Robert Siegel, editor-in-chief of the Onion, which bills itself as "America's finest news source," said he was amazed at the Evening News' gullibility.

"Wow, even journalists now believe everything they read," Siegel said from his home in New York. "If I were a reporter in Beijing and found an item like that . . . I might want to follow up and check my sources. Readers fall for that kind of thing all the time, and maybe I was naive, but I thought reporters would be smarter."

Though still under the thumb of the government, the media in China have become more freewheeling in recent years and also more competitive, forced to duke it out for market share and turn a profit.

Chinese readers have more options to choose from than ever before, including the Internet, and are no longer captive to such hoary publications as the Communist Party's flagship, the People's Daily.

The Beijing Evening News, which boasts a circulation of about 1 million, is fighting off challenges from a raft of other newspapers and magazines.

Many papers now rely on contract freelancers to provide all sorts of content, including international news. This has given rise to a slew of young, Internet-savvy, English-speaking writers who freely lift stuff from the Web and submit it to editors who adopt a "don't ask, don't tell" attitude toward the material's origins.

Huang couldn't be reached for comment Thursday. He or she -- the name is androgynous and most likely a pseudonym -- appears not to be one of the paper's longtime contributors. An electronic archive search on the paper's Web site yielded Huang's byline on only two stories in the last two years.

Both appeared in Monday's edition. One was the Onion rip-off. The other, on the same page, was a longer investigative piece about the lack of security screening for most private charter flights in the United States.

But a little checking showed that this story, too, was cribbed: It was a direct translation of a front-page article from Sunday's Washington Post.