Disinformation is becoming more and more common. Usually fake or fictional information is passed off as real information. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that a Chinese broadcaster showed clips from the 1980s' movie Top Gun and reported on January 23 that they were a recent military drill. More on the report below the jump.
Beijing has lately stepped up its campaign against the country’s “fake news” scourge, with the General Administration of Press and Publications putting pressure on news organizations to dismiss journalists suspected of doctoring their stories. Ironically, the latest example of alleged news fakery comes from China’s own state broadcaster, CCTV. ... As noted yesterday by the blog Ministry of Tofu, the alleged IPR violation, spotted by Internet user “Liu Yi,” took place during a Jan. 23 evening news broadcast. CCTV has removed the clip in question from its website, but a copy of the broadcast posted on Chinese video sites does reveal some striking similarities. ... CCTV typically posts the full evening news broadcast online, along with individual clips of each story, but a check today of the CCTV website for Jan. 23 revealed only the individual clips. The full broadcast is missing and there is no link to the air force training story.
This wouldn’t be the first time Chinese media have been caught appropriating fictional material from the U.S. for use in news. In 2002, the popular Beijing Evening News tabloid translated and published as genuine a satirical news article by The Onion about U.S. Congress threatening to leave Washington D.C. unless the city built them a new building with a retractable roof. Five years later, the state-run Xinhua news agency infamously used an x-ray image of Homer Simpson’s head to illustrate a story about the discovery of a genetic link to multiple sclerosis.
And for nostalgia's sake, here's an old favourite from the Top Gun soundtrack. The movie's tagline was - Up there with the best of the best:
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Does anybody else find it odd that a government as homophobic as China has been would be that familiar with individual scenes from one of the most homoerotic fetish films mainstream Hollywood ever produced? I mean, do they not have a translator who could explain what the name "Goose" means? Or that if a straight man gets married, his buddies don't normally react as though they were threatened?
ReplyDeleteThanks for reflecting on Top Gun's nuances pblfsda. I always regarded it as a good example of hiding something in plain sight. In this case, the Chinese only seemed interested in cribbing bits of Hollywood fighter footage, not Top Gun's wooden sex scenes, for the evening news. Given that they were poring over a homoerotic fetish film for quasi-military clips for these nefarious purposes, I think they were probably running low on a general sense of irony - let alone self-reflection - in the first place.
ReplyDeleteAnd come to think of it, this was disinformation not misinformation. I'm changing the title of the post.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misinformation
"Misinformation is false or inaccurate information that is spread unintentionally. It is distinguished from disinformation by motive in that misinformation is simply erroneous, while disinformation, in contrast, is intended to mislead."
I couldn't help but laugh at this.
ReplyDelete