The China Post

I’ve been meaning to vent my spleen on this subject for a while now but never got round to it, but the last couple of days have finally pushed me over the edge. The subject of my wrath, I hear you ask ‑ China Post editorials.

If the Post were a paper in the West it would have gone out of business long ago because of all the libel lawsuits it would have lost. Some of the stuff it prints is simply breathtaking and it is hard to believe that anyone who reads it actually takes it seriously.

I don’t buy it myself, but I do go out of my way to read it each day just for a laugh. Come to think of it, maybe that’s why it is still in circulation – for its comedy value.

Below are a few samples of some of its recent classics.

First, you get blatant untruths that are never corrected such as May’s “Chiang Kai-shek was the supreme commander of allied forces in the Asia Pacific theater during World War II.”

Then you get statements made without anything to back them up, spurious links between unconnected subjects and just plain old simple gobbledygook, such as Monday Aug. 27’s “It's an insult to their Homo sapiens intelligence to be asked to voice yes or no on the question of Taiwan's UN bid. Internationally, what Chen is doing should be interpreted as a petty megalomaniac at his wits' end taking his last sleepwalk.” Uh?

Then there are the conspiracy theories. Here’s Monday Aug. 27 again. “In the end, he [Chen] was re-elected, thanks to sympathy votes cast on the day following a mystery-shrouded shooting which was rumored as an assassination attempt on him orchestrated by Beijing.”

And finally you get the downright offensive, such as this sentence from Aug. 31. “Many Taiwanese voters are undereducated and have only a vague idea which candidates are really capable.”

I would like to know who writes this juvenile dross and whether they have ever heard of fact checking or defamation? Maybe they just translate it from that other guardian of responsible journalism – the China Times.

Unfortunately, this kind of stuff is endemic to Taiwan's media - whatever its persuasion.

My theory is they get disillusioned former pan-blue legislators to sit around a table, take LSD, smoke a few joints and brainstorm the most ridiculous things they can think of. Then they pass it on to chimpanzees for copyediting and viola! Off to the print shop it goes.

That is the only explanation for such shoddy, inaccurate and downright laughable work