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| China-Japan-Koreas |
| China Daily rips off Reuters, copy-and-pastes Tiananmen Square sentence into Party newspaper |
| 2007-09-06 |
| At 20:31 on August 8, 2007, the online edition of China Daily posted an article titled: "China invites the world to Olympics" on its website. The following sentence appeared: "Security was tight around Tiananmen Square, where troops crushed pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989 with huge loss of life, as crowds gathered for the celebrations." This came about because someone did a copy-and-paste job from Reuters' Nick Mulvenney (dated 19:54 on the same evening) without checking the content. Within 12 hours, a revised version was posted. Someone over at China Daily is in big trouble for this slip-up, because someone assembled the article and someone else approved its publication. This same story was also carried verbatim at the English-language section of the People's Daily website. Someone else over there is also in trouble. This error was noted in the Hong Kong newspapers Apple Daily, Ming Pao, Sing Tao, etc. In particular, Apple Daily gave a flowchart of the process from Reuters to the China Daily website to the People's Daily website: Click through for screen capture. I run a website in China that creates original content, and I've been ripped off several times. People don't even think before they copy and paste. "But it was on the internet!" is the usual reply. The really ironic thing is that the government was the culprit 3 out of 4 times. |
| Posted by:gromky |
| #1 How do you know it wasn't the other way around and the clocks aren't just fast in China? Would it make a difference? And how do you know Reuters doesn't own the China Daily, or vice versa? |
| Posted by: Nimble Spemble 2007-09-06 15:12 |