{"id":160939,"date":"2013-08-04T15:22:52","date_gmt":"2013-08-04T22:22:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/?p=160939"},"modified":"2013-08-07T22:40:58","modified_gmt":"2013-08-08T05:40:58","slug":"fear-and-loathing-at-the-china-daily","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chinadigitaltimes.net\/2013\/08\/fear-and-loathing-at-the-china-daily\/","title":{"rendered":"Fear and Loathing at the China Daily"},"content":{"rendered":"
Mitch Moxley, who arrived in China in 2007 for a job at The China Daily<\/a>, recounts the frustrations of working for China\u2019s English language, Communist Party mouthpiece newspaper<\/strong><\/a>. He has recently published a memoir of his six years in China, entitled Apologies to My Censor: The High and Low Adventures of a Foreigner in China<\/a><\/em>. His stint at the China Daily, however, only lasted one year:<\/p>\n The stories I was assigned were mostly puff pieces that would be tucked into the business section’s back pages, or in a weekend supplement called Business Weekly. One of the first stories I wrote for China Daily, with a Chinese cowriter, was about an Israeli products fair downtown. We sampled olives and hummus and wine. It was a lovely afternoon, but it wasn’t a story. It shouldn’t have even garnered a brief, but we wrote a feature about it anyway, reporting– despite a total lack of substantiating evidence — that Israeli goods were taking the Chinese market by storm.<\/p>\n [\u2026] While writing government-friendly puff pieces took up most\u00a0of my workweek, Friday was the one day I still worked an editing shift, polishing the China Daily<\/em> opinion pages. Many of\u00a0the articles weren’t so much arguments supported by fact, but\u00a0rants supported by nothing. Many violated everything I had ever\u00a0learned about journalistic ethics, including China Daily’<\/em>s own\u00a0code: “Factual, Honest, Fair, Complete.” It was sometimes hard\u00a0to stomach editing the opinion pages, but I didn’t have much of a\u00a0choice. I knew any complaints would fall on deaf ears.\u00a0[Source<\/a><\/strong>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Watch a boozy interview with Mitch Moxley via Beijing Cream<\/a>, or read The National Post\u2019s Q&A.<\/a> Read more about Mitch Moxley\u2019s memoir via CDT<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mitch Moxley, who arrived in China in 2007 for a job at The China Daily, recounts the frustrations of working for China\u2019s English language, Communist Party mouthpiece newspaper. He has recently published a memoir of his six years in China, entitled Apologies to My Censor: The High and Low Adventures of a Foreigner in China. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1024,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[20,7,14744,14745,14746,100,5],"tags":[53,127,981,1588,4411,1023,330],"class_list":["post-160939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-information-revolution","category-level-2-article","category-level-3-article","category-level-4-article","category-politics","category-society","tag-censorship","tag-china-daily","tag-expatriates","tag-foreign-correspondents","tag-foreigners-in-beijing","tag-journalism","tag-media-censorship","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"yoast_head":"\n