Snooze reports
News reporter Yan Bingguang was recently removed from her reporting job by China's official Xinhua News Agency, after she was found to have used her own relatives as sources in a number of news reports. The scandal began, as so many scandals in China now do, on the internet, as Web users subjected Yan's reports to scrutiny and the allegations were followed up by her employer.
Yan has now become something of a sensation in the Chinese Web world. Internet users have compiled the whole series of reports she wrote using her own relatives as her chief sources, and Yan has been dubbed China's 'greatest journalist', a title obviously granted in jest.
Faking news stories is of course not new, but Yan's case is certainly exceptional. Thanks to the efforts of internet users, her habitual use of her own family members as source material was laid out for all to see, and the overall effect is comical. But the scandal should also get us thinking.
According to Xinhua and many Web users, Yan's conduct stems from poor professional ethics and a lack of regard for media credibility. The work of the journalist is largely the work of conscience. Those who aren't interested in the public's right to know or in social justice would do best to stay clear of this profession. And yet, as it happens, our profession is full of the crooked and the shifty. It's only that many journalists are more clever than Yan in concealing their crimes.
Much of the anger being vented over Yan's conduct is actually the product of festering frustration over the quality of news coverage in our country. I still remember how, in 2008, Xinhua reported in detail on the successful launch of the Shenzhou VII rocket, which had not yet occurred. And reporters have been jailed before in China for attempting to extort money from companies or individuals.
The reports from Yan that have come under scrutiny don't deal with sensitive political issues. They report information about the trifling details of life - children going on holiday, the weather changing in Harbin , family reunion dinners and the like. Why did she do this? The answer, obviously, is that she wanted to do her job in the most basic sense, by filing stories.
But the more important question is how she was able to do what she did. How was her conduct able to continue without raising alarms from other editors or reporters? It is certainly an indictment of how the entire editorial system works that Web users were able so easily to lay out a record of Yan's long-standing deception [while her employer apparently noticed nothing]. In this case, the system clearly failed the test.
In fact, not all of Yan's reports were fabrications. Perhaps it could even be said that the majority of them were truthful. Web users were able to get a handle on what she was doing precisely because her family members appeared repeatedly in her reports under their real names. Put all together, her news reports read like a diary of family life. Web users have poked fun at her, saying that her husband has now become a nationwide media darling, thanks to her reports and the ensuing scandal; even though he's an ordinary teacher, his every move was reported on as if he were a celebrity.
The reports were funny precisely because they preserve a great deal of truth. How different would these reports be if the names had been changed to 'Mr Wang', 'Miss Li' and 'Grandma Zhao'? They wouldn't be much different at all. The question is, why have these trifling records of ordinary life been transformed again and again into news?
Of course, journalists should be attuned to the mundane details of life. But if the quotidian life of an ordinary citizen becomes the routine focus of news reports, outside the context of more significant and newsworthy issues, we must ask tougher questions about why this is happening.
To put a finer point on it, another key reason these news reports on Yan's family life were able to escape notice and censure is precisely because they dealt with vapid and insignificant issues [and were therefore unlikely to cause trouble].
What issues did Yan's reports deal with? How could she file so many banal reports?
Read Yan's reports carefully, then think of many of the images we see on our television sets, and the reason becomes clear. The bulk of what we see is empty and superficial, reports that befit the times and changing seasons, but not good for much else.
When the Lunar New Year rolls around, we hear about how happy the people are this year; when it snows, we hear about how this promises a fruitful year to come; or, in a dramatic departure from the focus during the rest of the year, we are treated to gestures of solicitude for the welfare of the ordinary people.
We see the same reports every year, repeated endlessly. They don't require real reporting, and there are so many journalists who turn to those near and dear for help to accommodate this appetite for empty news. And so long as such reports persist, it will make little difference that a single Yan Bingguang has been fired from her news post.
