Follow-up: The car firecracker story and soft advertising

A suspicious hole

On Wednesday, Danwei translated a story about a man who was killed when a stray firecracker punctured the door of his car and exploded in his spleen. The article was featured on the front page of the Daqing Evening News and was later republished on major online news portals.

Blogger Baixiaoci, who runs the photo-blog Capturing the City (抓拍城市), suspects that the article was faked, judging from details in the article itself, as well as how it was presented by major news portals:

A news item online said that in a place in Heilongjiang, an out-of-control firecracker penetrated a Chang'an Suzuki and blew up a passenger's spleen, killing him. The news article on the web page had an accompanying photo showing a hole in the car door next to the handle, and another photo showing blood traces.

This is basically a fake news item. (1) The hole in the door does not look like it was punctured by explosives. It looks more like it was cut by a blade. And the location of the damage to the car door is even with the passenger's upper torso, not his stomach. (2) The spleen is a blood reservoir, and were it to be exploded, there would be much more blood lost than the few spatterings shown in the picture, which you'd get from slaughtering a chicken. (3) The final point of doubt is that this hard news item, which tragically illustrates the danger of fireworks, strangely ended up in Xinhua's Auto Channel, where it was the leading item in the photo box. As we all know, the consumer sections of most domestic media, whether newspapers or websites, are basically there for the service of advertisers. In other words, journalistic ethics are almost entirely absent from consumer sections in newspapers and consumer channels on websites. Real estate sections are there to serve real estate developers. Auto sections exist to serve car dealers. Therefore, this negative news item about Chang'an Suzuki that ran in Xinhua's Auto Channel, is very likely a PR document issued by one of its competitors.

The news first appeared in the local news pages of the Daqing Evening News. Why, when it made it to national media, was it relegated to the industry and consumer sections? Because small, local media are more easily bought off.

As one of Baixiaoci's commenters reminds us, Daqing Evening News was the home of Liu Weiqiang, the photographer who faked the award-winning image of the Qinghai-Tibet train passing behind a herd of Tibetan antelope.

Update (2009.02.15): Although the story is still visible as a page image in the e-paper version of the Daqing Evening News, the text version has been removed. It's still present in Xinhua's Auto Channel.