Quick Thoughts: Hecaitou on the Media
Sometimes we run across things in blog posts that we don’t have time to translate all of (or that aren’t worth translating in their entirety). In that spirit, we bring you Quick Thoughts. Today’s is from this post on Hecaitou’s site.
Translation
The world we live in is not perfect, and the media is a good example of that. In domestic media, we can rarely find anything true, to the extent that if a writer does actually manage to do their job, readers treat it as a feat of great heroism. And when the international media discusses China, it’s very hard for them to leave out prejudices and misunderstandings and get the complete picture of China. The reporters change every few years, so it’s rare to find ones with any deep specialized knowledge.
But this really isn’t a problem [...] After so many years, we’ve learned that by reading the opposite of what the domestic media reports, one can get some of the truth. If there’s nothing readable, you can read the foreign press, as there’s probably more truth to be found there, although their conclusions may be wrong as many [reporters] write in accordance with their own thoughts and opinions. The world is like this; you need to find the solutions yourself and the truth is always a jigsaw puzzle [...] There has never been a perfect media, or a completely true news report, so you need to judge for yourself. The main point of the expression “listen to both sides and be enlightened, listen with one ear and be ignorant” is that [one should] listen to different perspectives about things.
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Bravo, Hecaitou.
Hecaitou completely misunderstood Raymond Zhou’s satire in China Daily, he didn’t get the sarcasm at all. Zhou was making fun of the Western media at Han Han’s expense.