01Aug BBC Uses Fake Photo To Defame China for Eight Years
A photo which existed at least eight years ago was appearing on British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) website on 29th in a news entitled “Congressman of the United States: China Watches Olympic Hotel Guests Secretly” and the photo was captioned “China is enhancing its monitor on Olympic Games guests’ activities!”
On July 31, a post was published on some internet forums entitled “Revelation of an old photo used by BBC” and it was widely reproduced on the internet. Many Chinese internet users gather their power to launch counterattacks on false report of the West. The picture has been used for many untrue reports by BBC.
Some internet users noticed that between July 23 and October 25 in 2006, BBC’s report on “China’s Internet Blacklist” and other reports had a photo of two polices looking at the computer. The photo had been captioned as “China Tries to Monitor Blog Activities”.
Traced back to September 23, 2002, in both English and Chinese BBC websites posted an article titled “China acts on net ‘addicts’” at the same time. The same picture was used captioned as “Chinese police want to monitor internet activity”. On July 21, 2001, the same photo was used again on a news article about the China internet supervision.
The same photo appeared in the BBC news between August 26 and August 21 in 2000. This time the caption was “authorities wary of the web”.
Some internet users point out that the photo had nothing to do with the reality of China. A user replied that China does not use those ancient monitor in the photo anymore. There is also argument that the uniform in the photo is not the new uniform of China police. The police uniform has been changed since 2001.
Source: Huanqiu
August 1st, 2008 at 11:30 pm
True, it seems like they’re using a stock photo a bit liberally. It doesn’t change the fact that the Chinese government does control the internet very closely- for example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_People’s_Republic_of_China
August 2nd, 2008 at 12:27 am
julian: yes, it’s undeniable the communist government is controling the internet.
August 3rd, 2008 at 8:06 pm
The BBC isn’t saying that literally these policemen are watching hotel guests. And the photo isn’t used as any sort of “proof” of the statements in the article. So I don’t really understand the point of this article.