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Chinese state media burned by Wall Street Journal

Rack OpsRack Ops Member Posts: 18,597 ✭✭✭
edited January 2011 in General Discussion
With side by side video goodness....

http://online.wsj.com/video/cctv-tries-to-pass-off-top-gun-clip-as-real/43EC0FC2-A440-4522-8E81-437EC747D30A.html?KEYWORDS=top+gun

eijing 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.

In a development that could further inflame Hollywood's frustrations with unauthorized reproduction of its intellectual property in China, Chinese netizens are accusing CCTV of repurposing footage from the movie "Top Gun" for use in a news story about an air force training exercise.

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.

Contacted by China Real Time, a media relations representative in CCTV's foreign affairs office, Yin Fan, said the broadcaster had no immediate comment on the accusations.

- Josh Chin. Follow him on Twitter @joshchin

CORRECTION: This post has been revised to correct an erroneous reference to the CCTV segment having aired on Nov. 23. As the post states elsewhere, the segment aired on Jan. 23.
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