The Friday, August 10, 2001, issue of Smartertimes.com commented on the New York Times's interview with the Butcher of Beijing, Jiang Zemin. "If you ask my view of The New York Times, my answer is it is a very good paper," Mr. Jiang said then.
Well, yesterday, the Chinese Communist Party organ known as the People's Daily published its own account of Mr. Jiang's interview with the New York Times. "Jiang Zemin Meets U.S. Guests," was the cutline under the photo of Mr. Jiang and Arthur Sulzberger Jr. on the People's Daily Web site. And the People's Daily account of the interview is significantly different than the account and transcript that appeared in the New York Times.
The People's Daily, for instance, reported that Mr. Jiang said, "Any attempt to split Taiwan from China will never get anywhere. China is bound to achieve complete reunification. . .People living on both sides of the Taiwan Straits are Chinese. Blood is thicker than water."
Those words don't appear in either the Times excerpts from the interview, the Times news article about the interview, or the Times op-ed page column about the interview.
Similarly, the People's Daily paraphrases Mr. Jiang as offering a defense of the lack of freedom of the press in Communist China: "The media supervision is an important part of people's supervision, he said. Chinese media have played an important role in supervising governmental officials. Many newspapers, TV stations, radio and other media have columns or programs devoted specifically to the anti-graft issue and have in fact exposed quite a lot of problems, he said." This, too, doesn't appear in the New York Times.
Smartertimes.com learned of these discrepancies by way of an e-mail from a reader directing us to an article in the Inquirer, a British technology news site. There are at least two possible explanations for the discrepancies. The first is that the Times account is accurate and the People's Daily account has been edited for domestic consumption -- in other words, Mr. Jiang is intentionally sending one message to the West and a different, more bellicose and defensive message, to his own people. If that is what happened, then the New York Times might want to let its readers in on this fact so that they are not misled about Mr. Jiang's true position. The other possible explanation is that the People's Daily account is accurate and the Times account omitted, because of space constraints or news judgment, some of the remarks Mr. Jiang made in the interview. The transcript that appeared in the Times and on its Web site is labeled as "excerpts," so it's certainly possible that some of the comments that appeared in the People's Daily account were trimmed from the Times account. Still, it's telling if what happened was that some of the comments that would make Mr. Jiang look silly to a Western readership were trimmed, while the Times emphasized Mr. Jiang's "Optimism on Relations With the U.S." Whatever's going on -- a failure of the Times to report the revised People's Daily account or an odd edit of the original interview -- it's enough to give readers a sense of why Mr. Jiang views the Times as "a very good paper."