How Did LA Times Promulgate Fake News for Trump?

After the recent Trump-Taiwan phone call, a piece of old "news" got fried hot again: this one claims that Trump has read hundreds of books about China, and revealed his top list of twenty in an "interview" with Xinhua, China's official news agency. "Trump's China book list" went viral in cyberspace to show that the President-elect of the United States isn't that ignorant. Chinese bloggers and cyber surfers alike cite confidently the LA Times as the source of this "news."

But it so happened that two rumor-wary friends, Victor and Zhang Tuomu, both Chinese Americans with a Peking University education, had read in the July 25 issue of the New Yorker ("Donald Trump's Ghostwriters Tells All") that Trump doesn't actually read books.  Suspicious of this  "Trump's China book list,"  the two did some digging, and Zhang Tuomu published their fact-checking results three days ago on a WeChat publication titled "反海外谣言中心" ("The Overseas Anti-Rumor Center"). The article, written mostly in Chinese, is now also circulating online, for example here.  

The gist of it is that they found no Xinhua report on the said interview with Trump, but discovered the following instead: 

• On April 26, 2011, a commercial PR website, newswire.com, published a "press release" titled "Donald Trump's Favorite Chinese Books." It came from "China Books," said to "Specialize in retail and distribution of western-published books in Mainland China." (This is strange, because the "Trump's China book list" shown in this "press release" contains many books banned in China.) 

•  On May 3, 2011, a report titled "Donald Trump has read a lot of books on China: 'I understand the Chinese mind'" appeared on the website of LA Times; the piece cites the content of the above commercial "press release" as actual news, apparently without fact checking. (Victor actually checked with the journalist, Tony Pierce, who verified that his "news" indeed came from newswire.com.) 

• On May 4, 2011, Beijing's Xinhuanet.com cited the LA Times report (see the irony? LAT says Xinhua said it first; Xinhua says LAT said it first) on Trump's book list, without mentioning the sensitive book titles.

From then on, the LA Times became the official source of "Trump's China book list" in Chinese internet articles.

By now we have all seen that the presidential election this year was glutted with fake news and baseless rumors, on a scale I've never seen in my 28+ years living in the United States. And so, in the scheme of things, the case we see here doesn't seem to be a big deal. What surprised—and disappointed—me is the role of the LA Times in this fake news promulgation, considering that, just the day after the election, I had tweeted with a sense of urgency and confidence:

I place my hope on American journalists! @nytimes @washingtonpost @latimes

— Xujun Eberlein (@InsideOutChina) November 9, 2016

I might also add that, the latest popularity of this "news" seems to have been stimulated by VOA's columnist, Han Lianchao, "a visiting fellow at the renowned American think tank Hudson Institute" (this title seems to shine an authoritative halo to VOA's Chinese audience), who unsuspiciously mentioned the "book list" on December 4^th when discussing Trump's China policy. Han said "据报道" – "as reported" – without specifying the source, but I wouldn't be surprised if he had seen the LA Times report, or the citing of it in Chinese cyberspace. Han might not be a New Yorker reader, and I don't blame him for his trust in LAT, because I trusted the paper too. That is, before this episode.

Now I can almost hear a furious rebuttal: You can't say it is the LAT!  It is just one reporter writing a blog post!  I totally agree, in fact I have been following a few real good journalists there, such as Barbara Demick, and in my mind they represent the LAT I liked and trusted.  But let's also face the inconvenient reality:  when people quote the fake news, they say "LA Times reported that," they don't care who the particular reporter is or which part of the LAT website published it.   

Btw, one thing that is still unclear to me is the motive for the 2011 "press release" placed on newswire.com. If it was a publicity stunt from a book dealer, which appears most likely, then why did it give a contact address in China?  Many of the books listed are not allowed to be sold there. We probably shouldn't rule out another possibility: it might have been a political stunt from … (add your guess here). If so, the irony is that the fake news has taken five years to ferment, in a now unpresidented political climate.

Gifts from a Great Man

Today Bob and I attended Jay Forrester's memorial service at the Trinity Episcopal Church in Concord. Jay was the founder of System Dynamics and Bob's mentor at MIT. Jay was also the inventor of magnetic core memory—the earliest widely used computer memory. (See the great man's obituary in New York Times, which was written before his death, with his approval.)

Beyond all that, Jay had a much more personal impact on my life. Twenty nine years ago, Bob was teaching System Dynamics in Shanghai, and I was studying it in Chengdu. Our first encounter in spring 1987 thus was an unintended gift from Jay.

When Jay was a young inventor of computer memory (1951)

Who'd have thought that Jay, even after his death, would give me another surprise? Today's otherwise completely traditional service took one digression from beautiful Christian hymns: we all stood and sang "Home on the Range" with the church's choir. Jay's children said this was a song Jay loved, and wanted to be sung in his service. Bob was amazed that I, who didn't know the other songs, was utterly at home with this one. I don't know who the Chinese translator of its lyrics was, but in the 1970s, for many of us "zhi-qings" (also called "sent-down youths"), the song had accompanied and consoled our homesick hearts through long days and nights in the countryside far away from home.

My eyes were wet when I softly sang the Chinese words I remembered from my youth—words I was surprised to still remember after all these years—they mingled harmoniously with others' English rendition. The words and music are so dear, intimate, nostalgic, that I've lost the ability to judge the translation.

[Chinese] 草原上的家园

在草原上 野牛自由流浪
我愿 把草原当家园
这儿难得听到 诅咒和吵闹
黑云消失在天外远方

我家 在草原上
有小鹿和羚羊在游荡
这儿难得听到 诅咒和吵闹
黑云消失在天外远方

[English] Home on the Range (listen to it on YouTube)

Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam
Where the deer and the antelope play
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the skies are not cloudy all day

Home, home on the range
Where the dear and the antelope play
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the skies are not cloudy all day