Chinese state media blunder hands 2020 Olympics to knocked-out Turkey
Sunday, 08 September, 2013, 5:25pm
Tokyo won the 2020 bid - but Chinese state media reported otherwise. Photo: AFP
Chinese Internet users on Sunday mocked state media for mistakenly reporting Istanbul would host the 2020 Olympic Games, the latest in a series of gaffes by the government-backed press.
Xinhua News Agency reported that Istanbul had won, while state television ran a headline during a live broadcast saying “Tokyo eliminated”.
Tokyo was the eventual winner. Both reports were later withdrawn, but some of China’s largest news portals, including Sina.com.cn and Sohu.com.cn, had already picked up the wrong message which continued to circulate in Internet postings.
Xinhua apparently mistook a vote by International Olympic Committee members to decide whether Istanbul or Madrid would advance in the voting after a first-round tie, which the Turkish city won.
“Xinhua’s blooper, which mistakes Tokyo with Istanbul, is killing the newspapers across the nation,” Li Wanyin, deputy editor of Changsha Evening News, wrote on Sina Weibo, a microblog service which is China’s equivalent of Twitter.
He claimed the newspaper had to urgently retract hundreds of thousands of copies in the early morning and suffered “severe loss”.
“As a news provider, Xinhua owes its clients an explanation and a self-reflection,” he added. Li removed his posting regarding the issue on Sunday afternoon without giving a reason.
Vibrant Chinese bloggers also chimed in on the topic.
“Chinese journalism schools often label Xinhua as among world’s top news agencies, how it deals with this blooper can put it to a real test,” said New York-based China analyst Bao Beibei on her blog.
Some others related the latest gaffe from an official news provider to an ongoing Chinese government clamp down on online-rumours.
“Liars must be held accountable, otherwise it’s not fair,” said a user who gave the name McMonkey.
In another case, the People’s Daily newspaper last year reported North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un had been named last year’s “Sexiest Man Alive”, after treating a spoof award by satirical US website “The Onion” as genuine.
More recently, state media mistook spaceship designs featured in the US smash sci-fi show Battlestar Galactica for aircraft carrier plans.
But some of the Internet comments in China, whose capital Beijing hosted the 2008 Summer Games, had an anti-Japanese tone as the two countries are locked in a territorial dispute.
“It’s an international joke to let this country host the Olympics,” said one under the name Kid Green.
“Hope they can settle the matter of the Diaoyu Islands and ‘comfort women’, admit the massacre and face history.”
Both Beijing and Tokyo claim islands in the East China Sea, called Diaoyus by China and the Senkakus by Japan, which administers them.
Wartime history also remains a sore point between the neighbours, including the 1937 “Nanjing Massacre” and the use of women from China and other countries in military brothels during World War II.
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