As China’s government promotes its successes in containing the coronavirus to audiences abroad, a heated backlash against a state-media reporter’s coverage of the pathogen shows that Beijing still faces a tough task selling its narrative at home.
With the numbers of new Covid-19 cases in China dwindling, the country’s ruling Communist Party has worked both internally and internationally to portray itself as decisive and forceful in facing down the pandemic.
These efforts included glorifying the work of Liao Jun, a veteran reporter with the official Xinhua News Agency, whose coverage of the coronavirus epidemic in central China’s Hubei province has been portrayed by Beijing as heroic.
Chinese social media has recoiled with anger at the lionization of Ms. Liao, saying she helped propagate fictions that clouded the severity of the outbreak in its early days.
The outrage was sparked by Ms. Liao’s appearance at a news conference this month organized by the Chinese government’s publicity office, where she said she and her fellow reporters are “iron people” serving bravely on the battlefront against a deadly epidemic.
“If you have a little conscience, then you should refuse the accolade and decline to speak,” read a widely circulated essay posted on a public social-media account belonging to Gu Wanming, a retired Xinhua reporter. “Otherwise people will say that you ‘trod on the blood of others to ascend the podium.’”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-...article_inline
people don't like to be spun
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