In China, a wave of stories on sexual crime contained excessive salacious and violent content on the internet has raised security fears of women, what is the right way for professional media accounts on social platforms to regain their reputation on sexual crime reporting?
The women were walking side by side along the street of Honggutan in Nanchang province, oblivious to the man running towards them. On the grainy CCTV footage, you could see him as he attacked one of them, stabbing her multiple times with a knife that he pulled from his jacket.
It was shocking to watch and screenshots from the attack quickly spread on Weibo, the Chinese social media channel, along with theories about his motives. People started to suggest that the man “hated women”, that “he wanted to kill them because he couldn’t find a wife” and that “he wanted to kill the tall one but killed the pretty one instead”. Without knowing the origin or the authenticity of the screenshot, lots of high-profile media accounts on Weibo forwarded it with a caption saying “insider: assailant wants to kill a beautiful girl”, which pushed the issue of women’s safety to the forefront of public opinion.
Although that screenshot turned out to be a fake one in the end, women’s fear of being assault did not just disappear but instead intensified. “How do I feel? I feel that the person killed in the video is my friend, or even myself,” said a blogger on Weibo, and this tweet has been retweeted 30,000 times and agreed 40,000 times, that’s how anxious women are in China.
This was an example of the power of social media to spread misinformation and fake news. What’s worse, this time, the primary culprits are not new digital start-ups, but traditional established publications, who are trying to get more visits to their social accounts with shocking crimes related to sex and gender. According to Sipan Li, a worker for women’s rights, “No media has verified those widely circulated claims, most of the discussions that have taken place are not based on facts, social media has made too many opinions come too soon, and the facts come too late.”
In fact, it is common for editors of who run media accounts online to put much more effort into the headlines than those who write for newspapers. According to Hanxia Ni, an editor who works in the New Media Department of Jinhua Daily, her group is forced to have more compelling headlines to get the attention of the audience by the reading habits of the audience in the new media era. “Nowadays people prefer fragmentation reading, they don’t like long stories, but to compete with others, you need at least more than 100,000 hits on one article, so if we want to archive that, we need to try our best to leave a cliff-hanger on the headline or pull out some really weird points to arouse people’s curiosity,” said Hanxia Ni.
Under that circumstance, some traditional media outlets no longer follow the same professional codes when they run official accounts on social media platforms. This could be fully seen in their recent reporting on the sexual assault case of a Chinese billionaire Qiangdong Liu, the chief executive, a famous online-shopping website jd.com.
After Qiangdong Liu was accused of sexually assaulting a female student during his stay in American, he was granted immunity from prosecution in his sexual assault accusation by prosecutors of Minnesota because of insufficient evidence. Later, the survivor, Jingyao Liu, filed a civil lawsuit against Qiangdong Liu. During the whole process, tradition media institutions, which should have a relatively high threshold and authoritative voice, abandoned professional ethics and produced a large number of unqualified news products on their official accounts of social media platforms such as Weibo.
For instance, the news was firstly reported by People’s Daily through its official account on Weibo with the title “Qiangdong Liu is innocent!”. Disappointingly, most Chinese media just forwarded exactly the same title without changing a word. Many people have criticise such title for blurring the key legal concept, because “no charges” does not mean “not guilty”. According to the editorial of China Women’s News, Firstly, since there’s no prosecution, neither Qiangdong Liu can be proved guilty nor innocent, not to mention he still faces civil action. Secondly, even if Qiangdong Liu escaped criminal prosecution, as a married man, the moral problem of him cannot be ignored, so there’s no need to use an exclamation point.”
Moreover, the official account of the Southern Metropolis Daily released an anonymous phone recording of the negotiation between Qiangdong Liu’s lawyer and the victim without verifying the facticity. The audio file is later confirmed to have been edited 23 times, entirely cutting the victim’s frantic, sobbing, silent response, as well as 52.2 seconds of repeating that she couldn’t give a plan.
Unfortunately, just like before, many high-profile media accounts retweeted that recording without second checking. Worse, @SinaTechnology reposted the audio with a statement that it had confirmed with people who close to Qiangdong Liu, and @WangyiNews forwarded the audio with the title “the victim asked for money from lawyers”. However, the truth is, Liu’s lawyer is the one who took the initiative to call the victim and wanted to offer her compensation.
The poor performance of the media in the case of Qiangdong Liu is increasingly being criticised by journalism scholars. According to Aiguo Shen, a journalism professor at Zhejiang University, it’s not exaggerated to say that’s the depravity and collapse of traditional media. “The most fundamental value of a traditional media is to sort out the truth, to dig out the right content, to reveal the pattern of its evolution, to really tell us the essential things, that’s what they’re supposed to do, sadly, as far as I can see, no institutional media has done that,” said Aiguo Shen.
However, some people reckon that as long as the media continuously publishes the latest news and timely revises the previously published content, there will be no problem. Kecheng Fang, a PhD Communication researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, argues against that opinion. “Firstly, most readers won’t keep up with the latest news comprehensively while remaining open-minded and willing to revise their ideas timely, secondly, network consensus warfare is becoming fierce, more companies or even individuals are deliberately releasing false news on social media to shape public opinions,” said Kecheng Fang, “Under such circumstance, if the institutional media do not take the initiative to verify information before releasing news, they will become a puppet.”
However, verifying the information is becoming more challenging and difficult in the era where individual users of social media platforms can produce their own version of media contents independently.
On the one hand, a wave of traditional media institutions has sacrificed the accuracy of their reports to race against time. Jianhui Xu, a journalist of Daily Jinhua, pointed out that now journalists are easily lost in the pursuit of page views. “We are becoming impetuous, verification takes much more time, but if you want more attention, you need to publish as soon as possible, so now few journalists have that patience to verify” said Jianhui Xu, “We used to check every detail every time, now many of us just want to be the first to publish the news.”
On the other hand, some people blame the traditional Chinese culture, that society has no respect for the fact for thousands of years. According to Xiaoli Tai, an assistant journalism professor at the Communication University of Zhejiang, it would be impossible for journalists to actually find out the whole truth relying solely on their own poor professional ideals. “You ask an interviewee whether his words are quoted properly, he always says ‘yeah something like that’, but that is not equal with ‘absolutely right’, so it’s hard for a reporter to keep staying away from traps, because you don’t know that something you’re trying so hard to cover isn’t real, that you’re being misled too far,” said Xiaoli Tai.
So, how could a professional media institution in China improve the ability to verify user-generated information?
One possible solution is replacing the people who run social media accounts with senior journalists. According to Qingyun Fang, chief editor at Daily Jinhua, though almost all the traditional media agencies have set up official accounts on Weibo, they don’t regard those accounts as an equally important voice platform as newspapers, those accounts are now mostly managed by some interns or newcomers, which is not right. “Whoever runs those accounts should be an excellent journalist with the experience from long-term practice in the front line of news writing and editing, who would agree that the truth of news is the life of news, and be willing to sacrifice timeliness for the accuracy of the news,” said Qingyun Fang.
Another way to push journalists to take the responsibility to verify everything in their reports is promoting peer review among journalists who run social media accounts for traditional media institutions. In that way, the work of involved journalists would be examined by people who have the same duty. Xiaoli Tai, an assistant journalism professor at the Communication University of Zhejiang, believes that the price journalists need to pay for their mistakes now is too low. “They won’t change unless they realise that they may be punished,” said Xiaoli Tai, “with peer review, when journalists fail to act ethically, they would be criticised in public from a professional point, which would prevent them from doing that again.”
Besides, some people think it’s also more important for the media to change people’s attitudes towards sexual crimes through popularising relevant knowledge. Kecheng Fang stresses that verification is just the basic work, more analytical research should be given to background information and professional interpretation. “It would be much more helpful if the media could disseminate some statistics and knowledge related to some rape cases,” said Kecheng Fang[9], “for example, most rapes happen between acquaintances, not strangers, and if you don’t say ‘yes’, then it’s rape, these contents have been posted on social media platforms, but by personal accounts, not official media accounts.
In China, there is a saying, “the content is the king”, which means the content of the reporting is the most valuable thing to the media. As Bailin He, a journalist who works in the news centre of Jinhua Daily, said at an editorial meeting of Daily Jinhua, “Though the traditional media needs the technology of new media to widely spread its professional journalistic works, all the good refresh articles are all based on in-depth interviews, careful verification and careful selection of words.”