China Bashes the West for Murdoch Scandal
The Beast: Isaac Stone Fish Jul 20, 2011
The day after British opposition leader Ed Miliband called Rupert Murdoch’s political influence “dangerous,” Chinese press agency Xinhua ran an article entitled “Looking at Western Media from Murdoch’s ‘Tapping-Gate’ Scandal,” castigating Western societies for their unethical reporting behavior and faulting the Western press establishment for “infringing on citizens’ rights.” When Murdoch took out advertisements in newspapers across Britain to apologize for News of the World’s wrongdoings, the Shanghai Communist Party newspaper Liberation Daily wrote that “‘freedom of the press,’ once seen as a standard in Western media, is now being widely doubted by citizens from every country because of the wanton growth of [Western media’s] disregard of laws or morals.” The official mouthpiece of the Communist Party, the People’s Daily, dived into the debate, saying “actually, Western media doesn’t care about social morality.” Ouch. “The spin on these stories seems to be the corruption of Western media,” says Ying Chan, director of the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at Hong Kong University. “It is a not so subtle attack on the freedom of the press.”