Have you seen this image floating around your interwebs? A savvy internet reader might suspect it. A
Have you seen this image floating around your interwebs? A savvy internet reader might suspect it. And you’d be right to. This “Beijing is so polluted they’ve installed a giant sunrise screen instead” story is totally bogus.How do stories like this happen? One reason is shabby journalism, something for which the Daily Mail is renowned. As TIA points out, the originator, a writer named James Nye, is based in New York (as is this writer, for the record). Nye surveys a wide range of click-bait topics that fall between morbid and Kardashian. The discovery of that post-apocalyptic photo may have had something to do with the photo search for an article Nye had written earlier that day about severe turbulencein a flight bound for Beijing. The leap to making up news based on a photo isn’t hard, particularly when you crib a quote from an unrelated Associated Press story to round it out.But more to the point: Western readers eat this stuff up. Based on Quartz’s experiences, Western audiences generally love Chinese “airpocalypse” stories. It’s not only on Quartz that they tend to attract readers; a friend and editor of a China-focused news site told me last summer that he’s equally baffled by the enduring popularity of air pollution stories. And by interweaving the themes of pollution and the government’s Orwellian-tinged attempts to control daily life, the Daily Mail offers a double-whammy of Western reader stereotypes about China.More on the hellscape that wasn’t, from Quartz. -- source link
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