Op-Ed: CNN hit by Xinhua over Cafferty gaffe

OK, it’s comedy time at the CNN editorial desk. CNN’s Jack Cafferty has created big wave of official reactions from China. Cafferty referred to Chinese “goons and thugs”. He later clarified that he meant the Chinese government. Classic diplomacy.

The contrast between CNN’s version of events and China’s reaction is quite a study. CNN:

The Chinese Foreign Ministry demanded Tuesday that CNN's Jack Cafferty apologize for remarks he made last week, in which he called the Chinese "goons and thugs" and said products manufactured in China are "junk."

"Cafferty used the microphone in his hands to slander China and the Chinese people (and) seriously violated professional ethics of journalism and human conscience," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said Tuesday, according to China's state-run Xinhua news agency.

… "On this occasion Jack was offering his strongly held opinion of the Chinese government, not the Chinese people --- a point he subsequently clarified on The Situation Room on April 14

Xinhua:

Cafferty's remarks drew indignation from Chinese at home and abroad, and Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu demanded an apology from CNN as well as Cafferty himself.

CNN then issued a statement on Tuesday saying "it was not Mr. Cafferty's nor CNN's intent to cause offence to the Chinese people, and CNN would apologize to anyone who has interpreted the comments in this way". However, the network stated that Cafferty was offering his "strongly held" opinion of the Chinese government, not China's people.

Not that this is much of a departure from the normal US-China slanging match, which has now been going on for years while the US invests in Chinese manufacturers. This is the exact quote from Cafferty, in context, from CNN International:

"I don't know if China is any different, but our relationship with China is certainly different," Cafferty said. "We're in hock to the Chinese up to our eyeballs because of the war in Iraq, for one thing. They're holding hundreds of billions of dollars worth of our paper. We are also running hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of trade deficits with them, as we continue to import their junk with the lead paint on them and the poisoned pet food and export, you know, jobs to places where you can pay workers a dollar a month to turn out the stuff that we're buying from Wal-Mart.

"So I think our relationship with China has certainly changed," he said. "I think they're basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they've been for the last 50 years."

It’s difficult to know where to start with this statement. US industry has been happily doing that for years, and outsourcing everything it can. Tens or hundreds of thousands of American jobs were sent to China, India, Vietnam and Mexico. The trade deficit with China is being caused by Americans buying American and other nations’ goods made in China. Mattel’s lead toys weren’t discovered by Mattel. Nor were the others found by those who were making a buck out of them, to my knowledge. They were found by other people checking their products. The Chinese contracts were to American buyers. The US bonds are being bought by foreigners because even Americans won’t touch them, and the Chinese and other foreign buyers have actually lost money on the deal, since the US dollar devalued. And he works as a commentator for CNN… Just for the record, I don’t know who Cafferty is, nor do I care, on the basis of that statement of ignorance. But this is the same disinformation which has been fed to the US public for the last 12 months or so. The guy's playing to the grandstands. Maybe CNN are looking for their own Ann Coulter. The Chinese, meanwhile, have been able to make quite a nice bit of media capital out of Leadfoot Cafferty’s hyperactive mouth. An anti-CNN website introduced by China's Foreign minister, is one result. Another is allegations of fabricated news about Tibet. China was reacting, pretty badly, to the furor about Tibet and international protests. Cafferty and his mouth have let the Chinese media off the hook, at least for now. As you can see, Xinhua is now full of righteous anger, articles… and not a thing about foreign protests, or anything else. The Chinese should be pinning a medal on him.