Friday, February 12, 2016

Damn sneaky Chinese!

Agent 34, knowing Walt's love of headlines which are astonishing or funny or both, has sent along this photo of the front page of an unnamed newspaper.


Thinking that one of our legs might be being pulled, Walt asked Ed. to search the Internet to discover the source. Ed. reports that the picture, just as you see it, is all over the Net like a rash, but nowhere is there a picture of the entire front page. Some sites claim it is taken from "a Southeast Asian newspaper", which might lead us to guess the South China Morning Post, but since the Post was bought recently by Alibaba, that seems doubtful.

The photo accompanying the story may provide a clue. The photo appears in an article on the McClatchyDC website, headed "China's wish to hide submarines may be behind sea expansion". The photo is captioned thus: In this May 24, 2015, photo released by China's Xinhua News Agency, an anti-surface gunnery is fired from China's Navy missile frigate Yulin during the "Exercise Maritime Cooperation 2015" by Singapore and Chinese navies in the South China Sea. The dispute over the strategic waterways of the South China Sea has intensified, pitting a rising China against its smaller and militarily weaker neighbors who all lay claim to a string of isles, coral reefs and lagoons known as the Spratly and the Paracel islands.

Hmmm... Singapore, you say... That would suggest the Straits Times. But noooo... Further research, for which Ed. will be rewarded handsomely source [A double, please. No ice. Ed.] finds the same photo and the same caption on the web pages of the Belleville (IL) News-Democrat and the Wichita Eagle, under the headline "China may be trying to hide its submarines in the South China Sea".

So now we know. The super-DUH! headline is homegrown -- the product of the McClatchy Company, "a leading newspaper and Internet publisher dedicated to the values of quality journalism, free expression and community service." Guess the downstream papers didn't get the memo about correcting the headline. "Quality journalism..." LOL.

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