Personal Blog of Carl Pei

Today when I wake up and login to MSN the first thing that happens is that my friend writes me, “Look what this Chinese guy has done!” I thought it would be interesting to check out what the hell was going on so I followed the link to Aftonbladet, a large socialist owned newspaper that also happens to be one of Sweden’s most popular news portals.

While many people obsessively whine about the lack of professionalism at Aftonbladet, saying they often post unconfirmed, offbeat or made-up news, all to gain attention and earn money, I haven’t. I always thought that bitching about Aftonbladet was a fad, and as I hate to be a sheep, I refused. Until today.

So I check out their website, and on the front page I read about the Virginia Tech shootings. Only this was different from what all other news sources published, with their heading being “A Chinese goes on rampage and kills 32 people.” Nowhere in the entire article does it say that the gunman is Chinese, except for the very end where it reads, “Several witnesses described the gunman as a 25 year old Asian man.” The notion Asian encompasses Chinese, but vice versa is false.

And then I visit CNN.com and read what really happened.

The reasoning used by the authors & editors Annsofie Näslund (I’ve helped you format your name properly from AnnSofie - either dash or lose the capital letter), Magnus Sundholm and Malin Beeck is poor beyond comprehension. They will fail in life. At any rate, this blog post will be indexed soon and and when their future employers search their names on Google, they will find this and the quality work their names stand for.

As of now, the article has already been edited. “The Chinese” now instead says “the man”. But this doesn’t mean that my critique isn’t justified. How such a poor article could end up on the front page of one of Sweden’s most popular websites really goes to show the standards of Aftonbladet. So there, I’ve jumped the bandwagon bitching about Aftonbladet.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 9:47 pm and is filed under Current Affairs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.