Struggling with state news from China

filtering the news
Getty Images via DaylifePut 30,000 foreign journalists, who mostly have never been before in China, for a few weeks in Beijing, and you are bound to see some accidents. What caused a special kind of excitement was when the Dutch free daily De Pers started to use dispatches from Xinhua.
We wanted to give an idea how it looks like when you have to rely on that kind of news, explained one of the editors in another Dutch daily the NRC-Handelsblad.
It is not new, but the extend of the problem is magnified because of the Beijing Olympics: state-organized media in China become a legitimacy they do not deserve. I hope most media do have some China experience around to avoid too many mistakes in judging the value of this news. All media are allowed to have their own bias, it just makes sense to explain where the bias is coming from.