An erroneous report on Jiang Zemin's death cost Leung Ka-wing his job as ATV's senior vice-president for news and public affairs. Misreporting the life and death of such an important public figure is a major blunder in journalism; from that viewpoint, Leung quit over what was undeniably a big scandal.
But I am reminded of previous incidents involving past leaders. On reflection, this simple conclusion is not good enough.
A number of former state leaders have died during my lifetime. With the exception of Hua Guofeng - whose short-lived tenure at the top occurred three decades ago, and whose death in 2008 was a comparatively low-key affair - the deaths were treated as huge national events, and some indeed had grave political consequences. The death of Mao Zedong unleashed a power struggle, for example, and that of Hu Yaobang ignited a democratic movement.
For these reasons, every time a national leader dies, mainland media organisations find themselves in a strange place: the tension is sky-high yet there's little work to do. Their daily routine is turned upside down: entertainment news is generally cut, business and financial news is cut down, and the political news pages are 'taken over' by Xinhua, so that all reports are standardised. Yet, nerves in the newsroom are on a knife's edge, because editors and reporters need to make sure that the official Xinhua or CCTV report is reproduced without error - a single typo, or the wrong format used, would result in terrible punishment.
At the time Deng Xiaoping died, I was an editor of a Chengdu daily. Needless to say, everybody knew that only the Xinhua copy - in its entirety and without editing - could be used. But what about the page layout? Should the headline be vertical or horizontal? Which font and what font size to use? And what about the size and position of the photograph?
We were a young commercial paper, and no one in the newsroom had any idea what to do, so we resolved to wait to follow the example of the People's Daily. Then, a deputy chief editor had a brainwave; the editor rushed to a competitor's printing presses and, with threats and pleas, managed to get hold of a bromide of the People's Daily layout. Because of this, we managed to publish the news ahead of other papers. We were so proud of our wise deputy editor.
