In a morning about three months ago, an US delegation consisted of young scholars and reporters visited Global Times. I remembered that a young lady with a backpack came late. The event lasted about half an hour and she asked one question during it.
When the visit came to end, this American lady introduced herself to the editor in chief Hu Xijin and other colleagues in private. We later knew that she was Christina Larson from the famous American magazine Foreign Policy, who just wrote the widely read article "The People's Republic of Rumors" about China.
On Monday, Foreign Policy website published a 2,500 word article by Larson named "Global Times: China's Fox News," which is the longest article about the Global Times in the foreign media yet. The article has an accompanying collection of "The Top 10 Screeds in China's Global Times." It may show that China is attracting more and more attention from the US media.
But we feel the quality of the article didn't live up to what we expect from the Western media. The article even does not describe the location of the Global Times clearly. Larson claimed in her article that Global Times is subject to government review before publication, which is totally contrary to the fact.
These mistakes may have been caused by the laxity of the author. The information of the article comes mainly from materials on the Internet, what the author saw and heard during the hurried visit to Global Times with the delegation, and the opinions of some interviewees.
The article goes into some depth on Hu Xijin, editor in chief of the Global Times, and quotes his words in many places. However, these are not based on a formal and extensive interview.
The article also makes many unwarranted assumptions about the Global Times. For example, the article says that our chief purpose is to criticize the dishonesty of Western countries.
But our mission statement is clear, and printed on our front page: to discover a diverse world and to discover a complicated China.
The rapid development of the press has resulted in a complicated, diverse and even chaotic environment for the Chinese media in the past more than 30 years. However, the Foreign Policy article measures the increasingly varied media of China by the most limited standards.
The article makes unjustified guesses about the motivation of Global Times in reporting on sensitive topics, which makes us feel that the author is uncomfortable about a Chinese media talking about sensitive topics.
She might think that this is the privilege of the Western media. According to the logic of the article, Chinese press should keep silent about "sensitive incidents."
Of course, we still respect the effort of Larson and Foreign Policy in exploring Chinese problems. But we hope that the reports can be more rigorous, especially when they concern specific Chinese media.
Foreign Policy is a respectable media outlet and has many elite readers in US and the world. We believe that our suggestion is not a hard task for the editors of Foreign Policy.
It is not a bad thing for the media, especially the media in different countries, to respect each other.
Global Times usually criticizes the opinion of the US media. But we never report stories about the editorial department of the US media to prove the correctness of our criticisms.
However, we find that some Western reporters are keen on fabricating "inside stories" about the Global Times.
They quote the words of former staff of the Global Times to prove the "immorality" of the organization, instead of discussing the correctness of our opinion.
Anyhow, the article of Foreign Policy gives us an opportunity to hear the voices of the Western media in commenting on Global Times. And we expect that the editors of Foreign Policy are interested in listening to our opinions as expressed through this article.
The author is a commentator with the Global Times. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn