Note: This blog post also ran in the Society of Professional Journalism’s “Journalism and the World” blog. Click here to see the original post.
For a little while yesterday, there was a rumor that the gunman may have been a Chinese student who got his visa in Shanghai.
Chris O’Brien, a “language polisher” for the state-owned Xinhua News Agency dissects the reaction of the official government media on his blog, Beijing Newspeak. The comments section is also interesting, with some state TV folks weighing in as well.
(Thanks to Fons Tuinstra for pointing me to this blog.)
Danwei’s Joel Martinsen also had an excellent and detailed post on this subject: Chinese media reacts to Virginia Tech shootings. The Peking Duck and the Shanghaiist also weighed in on this on their blogs, with some interesting links and commentary.
I don’t cover politics, so I’m not going to talk about this further, just to add that the Beijing Newspeak blog is really interesting. A lot of folks who come over to China to work as aspiring journalists first get jobs as “language polishers” for the local media. Read this blog if you want to find out what that’s like.
Signing off in Shanghai,
Maria
