Chinese Coup Rumors Run Wild Online, Then Disappear
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
TL;DR:
1. A high-profile politician was relieved of duty.
2. A famous businessman tweeted a cryptic message about the censorship about this event on Sina Weibo.
3. Someone tweeted that there was police and military vehicles in front of the central government and thought it might be a coup.
4. Someone else tweeted that s/he heard gunshot.
5. Someone claimed it was actually fireworks (which was actually banned in inner parts of Beijing except for a few days during the Spring Festival).
6. The term “coup“ was then put into the censorship list of Sina Weibo and thus became unsearchable.
7. A spokesman of the Foreign Ministry denied rumors of the coup.
Seriously, what's the point of this kind of stuff?
Bloomberg was meta-reporting on the rumor, where it is factually verifiable that the rumor has arisen. In the absence of real information rumors are very important to our daily life; e.g., if chinadaily explicitly refutes a rumor, it gains some possibility of actually being true since otherwise they probably would not have taken the effort to refute it. I can understand why Bloomberg would take the presence of a rumor as news, not claiming any truth to the rumor as fact.
We are still on edge with the Wang Lijun Chengdu consulate incident. What the heck was that all about (we still don't have any clue)? Something is up, and since this year is a leadership change, there is a lot of power jockeying going on, really anything could happen. Its going to be a very interesting year to say the least.
"Bad journalism"? It is what it says it is: reporting of a major rumor that goes around Weibo. How is that not news worthy?
BTW the quoted picture [1] is a freaking tank, not any ordinary armed police/military vehicles from the previous rumor. Any one with a common political sense would immediately understand the implication of the appearance of a tank in the center of Beijing at times other than the National Day Parade. The Epoch Times, as usual, went to far on making this crap up.
The author had clearly checked the photos and verified they were indeed from two years ago for the preparation of the 60th National Day, what is the point of bringing this up? And since when does quoting disproved rumors from untrustworthy sources make good journalism?
[1]: http://asianconservatives.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Cou...
Btw, how do you know that the Epoch Times started the whole rumor? According to the article it came from Weibo.
The intention of the article is probably not so much to speculate whether there was a coup in China (which would unlikely pass unnoticed).
It is rather a report of the state of the society during the begining of a very unstable 2 years to come for the country. XJP has not even taken over the first of the 3 positions he needs to occupy to become the leader of the country.
At the same time, China has to continue to shift its economic model in a very fundamental way. And at the same time people getting more and more unhappy about the social inequality and the behavior of the new rich. Not to mention the continuing problems in the housing market.
> And since when does quoting disproved rumors from untrustworthy sources make good journalism?
It may help the reader to form their own opinion about the rumors, as opposed to CCTV style "this is the truth" reporting. Otherwise you may see the tank photos somewhere else and take them for real, because nobody told you that they had been disproved already. There is a long list of such photos in the history of journalism, photos that are still today taken for real by many people even though they had been disproved decades ago.
Actually, I've heard several fireworks in Shenzhen today (even heard one while writing this comment). I'm surprised anyone would assume a gunshot when fireworks are so common (at least, in the area where I live).