"Last night analysts told me"

only leading in Hong Kong
JWU via FlickrThe brouhaha surrounding the most likely untrue story in the South China Morning Post (SCMP) regarding black people being banned from Beijing's bars has brought back some found and less found memories of China-related journalism of the 1990s. In Shanghai, you would know all your other foreign colleagues. The leading South China Morning Post was delivered, three days after it was published in Hong Kong, in a brown paper back as if it was pornography. My main communication tool was my bicycle, since that was the main way to get in touch with people. We had pagers, but no mobile phones and had actually not a clue what was going on.
In that situation the South China Morning Post could thrive as a leading medium. And for sure, the newspaper has produced excellent, ground-breaking journalism on China.
But it made me more often also ashamed to be part of this now defunct class of media high priests. One of its trade marks was fabricating stories on all too often very flimsy evidence. It created riots, since that increased their sales.
China would turn into chaos after Deng Xiaoping would die. No mail would be delivered to Hong Kong after 1997, if "People's Republic of China" was not added. And at least twice a month China was at the verge of collapse. Ah, those where the days.
Those articles of a lesser quality often had this magic sentence: "Last night analysts told us..." and you knew some of the journalists had been drinking heavily with colleagues and were unable to come up with a really decent story. In the beginning it was fun to be one of those 'analysts' yourself, but you knew it was not the right thing to do.
Those days are over now the internet is firm in place, since the public can talk back, and scrutinize publicly the quality or journalists and do so. The South China Morning Post avoids that scrutiny by hiding behind a financial firewall. But when somebody throws a piece over that firewall, like in the case of the Beijing ban of black people, the internet tears it apart. I'm not reading the newspaper anymore, but that does not indicate the South China Morning Post has abolished its anonymous analysts yet.