EastSouthWestNorth led this Bystander to Black and White Cat’s post entitled “How The New York Times (should have) covered the Olympics“. It shows how the Beijing Evening News translated a New York Times piece on the Beijing Games and the editing that went on in the process, a taste of which below.
The net effect is to sanitize the Times’ piece by redaction. While some of the cuts could be explained by a need to cut for length, as the commentary of the post points out, “every single statement that could possibly be seen as negative — and there’s quite a lot — has been expunged from the Beijing Evening News article, and almost every nuanced phrase that carries any negative connotations has been turned into one of unqualified praise.”
Such Orwellian editing shouldn’t come as a surprise, but seeing the edits in the raw copy throws it into stark relief.
1 Comment
March 29, 2009 at 12:34 pm
[...] Wrinkles” and a translation/redaction of the article by Beijing Evening News (zh). (h/t to China Bystander, China Law Blog, many others). BWC author Rob then translated back the Chinese article and compared [...]