In re: "China is so damn opaque." Last month I took issue with some reporting done by two New York Times reporters on Bo Xilai. Here is the link to the Times article http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/26/world/asia/bo-xilai-said-to-have-spied-on-top-china-officials.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all and to the post here http://publicoccurrenc.blogspot.com/2012/04/bo.html.
Now one of the reporters, Ian Johnson, has written an article in the New York Review of Books that, by any reasonable reading, is more skeptical of the reporting he co-wrote with Jonathan Ansfield in the Times. The Times article reported on a metastasis of the original account of the murder cover-up accusation as the basis for the falling out between Bo and Wang Lijun, his police chief. According to the Times, the Center had been investigating Bo and Wang before Neil Heywood had even died. Here is the first sentence of the Times article:
"When Hu Jintao, China's top leader, picked up the telephone last August to talk to a senior anticorruption official visiting Chongqing, special devices detected that he was being wiretapped — by local officials in that southwestern metropolis."
Fact. That's a fact. Reported by The New York Times as a fact. That's all we do at The New York Times, report facts. Fact, fact, fact.
That's not a fact, that's "another possibility," one of many that Johnson writes about in the New York Review of Books; there are "other explanations." Why weren't these other possibilities and explanations written about in The New York Times? I don't know.
Ian Johnson should be commended for writing this. Commend.
Now one of the reporters, Ian Johnson, has written an article in the New York Review of Books that, by any reasonable reading, is more skeptical of the reporting he co-wrote with Jonathan Ansfield in the Times. The Times article reported on a metastasis of the original account of the murder cover-up accusation as the basis for the falling out between Bo and Wang Lijun, his police chief. According to the Times, the Center had been investigating Bo and Wang before Neil Heywood had even died. Here is the first sentence of the Times article:
"When Hu Jintao, China's top leader, picked up the telephone last August to talk to a senior anticorruption official visiting Chongqing, special devices detected that he was being wiretapped — by local officials in that southwestern metropolis."
Fact. That's a fact. Reported by The New York Times as a fact. That's all we do at The New York Times, report facts. Fact, fact, fact.
Now Johnson writes in the current issue of the New York Review of Books:
"Of course, one can come up with other explanations [for the Bo-Wang falling out]. ... Another possibility is that...they were investigating Wang and Bo for wiretapping senior leaders who had been visiting Chongqing, and so on.(3)"
"3. I contributed to a report on the possible wiretapping in The New York Times [citing to the Times article]."
That's not a fact, that's "another possibility," one of many that Johnson writes about in the New York Review of Books; there are "other explanations." Why weren't these other possibilities and explanations written about in The New York Times? I don't know.
Ian Johnson should be commended for writing this. Commend.
