August 5, 2008
Almost all of today’s newspapers reported on the terrorist attack that occurred Xinjiang yesterday, but since newspapers are not allowed to do their own reporting of this sort of sensitive subject, each paper printed the same Xinhua report. Thus the entirety of the newspapers coverage of the attack was the following two sentence news bulletin:
“On August 4, around eight o’clock AM, when the border police in Kashi, Xinjiang Autonomous Region were jogging during their morning drill, they were attacked by two suspects dring a vehicle who also detonated explosives. The attack caused 16 deaths and 16 injuries and the two suspects were arrested.”
Nonetheless, the media’s enthusiasm for the Olympic Games, now only three-day-away, is only increasing. In fact, one newspaper was so enthusiastic, it actually created it’s own Olympic-related news to report on.
Today the Shenyang Evening News, a local newspaper in Shenyang the capital city of Liaoning and a Olympic co-host city, ran a big headline on the front page: “China will organize the Olympic Games with the greatest enthusiasm”. Underneath the headline they printed a photo of the famous Brazilian football player Ronaldo de Assis Moreir, commonly known as ‘Ronaldinho’, holding a Chinese calligraphy scroll. The scroll was a present from the newspaper to the footballer and it featured the character “将”, meaning, roughly, ‘warrior’. The coach of the Brazilian Men’s Olympic football team, Carlos Caetano Bledorn Verri or ‘Dunga’, also received a scroll from the newspaper with another character “帅”, which means commander. The Brazilian football team arrived in the city three days ago.
Along with the photo, the newspaper ran a four-page-long article covering the ceremony they themselves organized to present these scrolls to the athletes.
The article begins:
This moment belongs to China; this moment belongs to Shenyang; this moment belongs to Shenyang Evening News! At 11:50, on August 4, when Brazilian super-star Ronaldinho and his coach Dunga received the presents from our newspaper- scrolls with “将”, “帅” respectively, the Brazilian Global TV Channel broadcast the moment live to the whole world. At that moment, the glamor of the Brazilian sports star and Chinese calligraphy became the center of the world for the fans…