Editor's Note: This article has been deleted from the original public account.
Author: Fang Kecheng
On February 4th, The Wall Street Journal published a commentary article related to the novel coronavirus pneumonia, titled "China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia" (https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-is-the-real-sick-man-of-asia-11580773677).
Although the phrase "sick man of Asia" does not appear in the text, these four words are particularly eye-catching in the headline - it is the "Eastern Sick Man" that everyone in China has heard of.
Using such a headline is obviously inappropriate. "Eastern Sick Man" is a term with a derogatory meaning in modern Chinese history, and is considered to be related to the humiliating history of being beaten due to backwardness.
More importantly, this term carries a sense of racial discrimination and has been used to depict Chinese people as unclean and diseased stereotypes. In the current outbreak of the novel coronavirus, such words are more likely to cause discrimination and exclusion against Chinese people in the international community.
Such words appeared in The Wall Street Journal, a newspaper with global influence. As a Chinese person, what should you do if you feel uncomfortable?
If you are engaged in self-media or traffic business, it is very simple: you just need to shout that The Wall Street Journal insults China and that the American empire will never die, and you can easily gain over 100,000+ followers.
But if you really want to know why The Wall Street Journal published such a headline, want to correct such wording, and want to oppose racial discrimination against Chinese people - in short, if you want to do something real instead of just harvesting traffic, then you need a different strategy.
First, we need to understand the nature of this article: is it a news report or a commentary article? In formal media, these two types of content are strictly separated, and journalists writing news reports cannot interfere with those writing commentary articles, and vice versa. There are also different strategies for dealing with problems in news reports and problems in commentary articles.
From the webpage, we can see that the word "OPINION" is written above the title, which means that this is a commentary article.
But media commentary articles also have different types, corresponding to different meanings. The first type is "editorial", which represents the opinion of the newspaper. If the term "Eastern Sick Man" appears in an editorial, it would be a very serious matter because the reputation and reputation of the entire newspaper are behind the editorial. The second type is "op-ed", which is not written by newspaper staff, but by external columnists or contributors. It does not represent the newspaper's views, but it will go through the hands of page editors.
This commentary article, written by a scholar (Walter Russell Mead, an international relations scholar at Bard College), belongs to the "op-ed" category. This makes things much easier - it does not involve the position of the entire editorial department, and we only need to contact the author and the responsible editor of the article to ask questions and raise objections.
From some messages circulating on social media in the past few days, it seems that some people have already done so. The author's reply was: the headline was added by the editor and has nothing to do with him. So, what did the editor say?
According to the content of a chat screenshot, someone spent 5 minutes sending an email to the editor, and the editor called back to explain after seeing it.
It turns out that the editor wanted to use the phrase "sick man". In Europe, this phrase was used to describe the Ottoman Empire. Searching in English-language media, we can see that this term has been used to describe countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Russia, etc., mainly referring to the economic problems of these countries.
Of course, this does not mean that phrases like "Asian Sick Man" or "Eastern Sick Man" are acceptable. Because it involves China's special history and the history of anti-Chinese sentiment in the United States, such usage is inappropriate.
After receiving feedback, The Wall Street Journal published two short reader responses explaining the inappropriate nature of the term.
In fact, a principle that serious institutional media will follow is: willingness to accept communication and questioning, and having space to accommodate dissenting opinions. So, if you are dissatisfied with the content of these media, the first thing you can do is to communicate with them. A few media even have positions specifically for communicating with readers and questioning the editorial department, called "public editors".
Of course, some friends may think: publishing these two short responses is not enough, we also hope that The Wall Street Journal will formally apologize.
If you have such a demand, what should we do?
There are roughly two strategies. First, launch a protest on social media, and use a hashtag to facilitate the organization of related content. When such protests reach a certain level of voice, other media may follow suit, creating further momentum. Currently, at least The Washington Post and NBC News have followed up and reported on this matter, putting pressure on The Wall Street Journal.
NBC News' report on this incident
Second, express your position and make demands to the editorial department as an individual. If you are a subscriber to The Wall Street Journal, you can also choose to unsubscribe and urge people around you to unsubscribe. This is called "consumer activism".
These are two possible effective approaches. Finally, I would like to mention an approach that is definitely useless, which is: petitioning the White House.
In the past few days, some people have called on everyone to sign a petition on the White House website, asking The Wall Street Journal to apologize. In fact, doing such a thing greatly misunderstands the relationship between American media and politics. Even if you collect 7 billion signatures, the White House will not take any action because the White House represents political power, and the First Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees that the independence of the media cannot be violated by political power.
You can even try to sue The Wall Street Journal in court, or organize protests and boycotts, but asking the White House to sanction this newspaper is definitely a waste of effort - Trump hates many American media outlets so much, if he could sanction them, he would have done it long ago without waiting for us to petition.
So, if we feel offended by American media and want to defend our rights, what we need is not to get excited and shout, nor to find a higher authority to complain to, but to choose the most appropriate strategy based on an understanding of the American media and political ecology.
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