The News Lens
Date: 2017/03/16
By: Jules Quartly

China and Taiwan offer different models for tackling the worldwide problem of fake news, top-down or bottom-up. Take your pick…

Image Credit: Simone Golob / Corbis / 達志影像

Having worked on an independence-leaning newspaper in Taiwan and a state-run daily in China, I found both were partly propaganda tools and content to bend facts to purpose. At one I couldn’t print cute pictures of pandas, at the other I wasn’t allowed to talk about the country’s leaders.

Though most of the job was getting facts straight and reporting the same news as everyone else, there was editorialization and bias, peddling political influence and cohabiting with big business through advertising. Fake news wasn’t so much of an issue.

Essentially, these papers agreed what the news was, or wasn’t, and put their own slant on it. Faced with a rapidly changing internet-based media environment they were slow to shift from cutting down trees and shoving papers through doors to going online. More recently, they have been left bemused by the rise of search engines and social media.2    [FULL  STORY]