When pressed, after other employees labeled the publication as "new media" and "news agency". There are several passages that characterize Lin as annoyed, irritated, angry etc with the interview process to the point of claiming “Can’t I just tell you that I was being a fucking idiot?”. Decontextualizing the nature of the interview and soundbite into a headline is not responsible journalism IMO, especially when it is well understood that a around half of most readers typically only consume headlines. Hence the response article labeling the original piece as a trap.
As for the balancing Chinese perspective, it was one paragraph of people who are disturbed that the publication is "synonymous with government propaganda" and a more detailed examination of one named individual who is apathetic towards the role of journalism to further support the narrative that Chinese students are "melon-eating masses". These accounts hardly encapsulates the amount of distaste among the Chinese diaspora for the publication, who regularly shits on the journal for being a clickfarm the same way many called out Buzzfeed or Gawker in the west, tacitly endorsing the generic Chinese as a monolith trope. There are plenty of Chinese students / general diaspora members who are high-information consumers that have a rational basis to support (and not support) the CPC whose world view is informed by both Chinese and Western sources and experiences. And unsurprisingly there is a conspicuous lack acknowledgement of their existence in western MSM, which is a shame because their perspective is worth understanding.
Anecdotally, there's many highly educated Romanian and Chinese immigrants up in Canada that escaped repressive conditions of the old country. You won't find many Romanian nationalists in the diaspora, and very few who returned. Not so with China. It's worth understanding why and I surmise the answer is more nuanced than these folks are brainwashed.
> Decontextualizing the nature of the interview and soundbite into a headline is not responsible journalism IMO
No, not particularly. However, having read both the contents and the piece the and summary of the "rebuttal", I find the headline sufficiently accurate. If find the headline more accurate that your attempt to characterize it as "the kind of headline one would engineer to dismiss Chinese perspectives"
>as for the balancing Chinese perspective, it was one paragraph of people who are disturbed that the publication is "synonymous with government propaganda" and a more detailed examination of one named individual who is apathetic towards the role of journalism to further support the narrative that Chinese students are "melon-eating masses".
I count 11+ paragraphs that detail the opinions of 3 different Chinese individuals (Xiao, Fang and Huang) and they are not presented as monolithic.
Both Fang "a communications professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong" and Xiao who "teaches at the U.C. Berkeley School of Information and runs a bilingual Web site called China Digital Times" (a great resource) are commenting on general issues regarding Chinese journalism / media propaganda apparatus doesn't meaningfully elucidate divergent perspectives of netizens on College Daily. The article doesn't deviate from generic all Chinese media is state controlled narrative which while true omits the fact that Chinese student diaspora doesn't exclusive derive information from Chinese sources or even trust Chinese sources, specifically in reference to College Daily which I've seen even die-hard /r/sino tankies dismiss. Instead condescendingly portraying Chinese media readers as "conditioned" to propaganda, "dissociated from truth", "one of the melon-eating masses", "passive onlooker with neither the means nor the interest to know what’s truly going on", deserving of "sympathy" because they're not even deplorable enough like western fringe opinion holders who had the freedom to form their own worldview. A brainwashed monolith.
The headline is accurate in the sense that's it's not factually wrong, but that's the nature of propaganda via omission. Repeat such pattern over many articles and it gives credence to the "rebuttal" that identifies the piece as one of many designed to "orchestrate a defamatory campaign" against China and in particular increasing politically active Chinese students in context of current political climate. I'm going to end my contributions here, but thank you for the discussion.
Calling something propaganda by omission is still not a rebuttal, especially when that rebuttal also fails to provide any of the supposedly "omitted" facts.
You can't just ignore things you disagree with because they are biased.
As for the balancing Chinese perspective, it was one paragraph of people who are disturbed that the publication is "synonymous with government propaganda" and a more detailed examination of one named individual who is apathetic towards the role of journalism to further support the narrative that Chinese students are "melon-eating masses". These accounts hardly encapsulates the amount of distaste among the Chinese diaspora for the publication, who regularly shits on the journal for being a clickfarm the same way many called out Buzzfeed or Gawker in the west, tacitly endorsing the generic Chinese as a monolith trope. There are plenty of Chinese students / general diaspora members who are high-information consumers that have a rational basis to support (and not support) the CPC whose world view is informed by both Chinese and Western sources and experiences. And unsurprisingly there is a conspicuous lack acknowledgement of their existence in western MSM, which is a shame because their perspective is worth understanding.
Anecdotally, there's many highly educated Romanian and Chinese immigrants up in Canada that escaped repressive conditions of the old country. You won't find many Romanian nationalists in the diaspora, and very few who returned. Not so with China. It's worth understanding why and I surmise the answer is more nuanced than these folks are brainwashed.