Reporter suspended over family interviews
0 
The Xinhua News Agency suspended a reporter Monday after Internet posts disclosed that she had interviewed members of her family in more than 30 of her news stories published by the agency.
A statement released by the Heilongjiang branch of the Xinhua News Agency Monday said the branch decided to suspend Yan Bingguang after it was confirmed that she had interviewed her family members in several of her articles.
The statement said the reporter's behavior violated the agency's policy on news reporting, and that the branch required all reporters and editors to maintain the agency's credibility by improving professional journalistic ethics.
The Xinhua reporter became a figure of online ridicule after a post listed excerpts from articles written by her in the past few days and said that all of them were based on interviews with her family members, including her husband, child, father and sister.
In an article written by the reporter about a Harbin resident, also surnamed Yan, who was diagnosed with cancer, the protagonist turned out to be none other than her father. The article also described how her family took care of him, in a story that Internet users lambasted as being nothing more than a family biography.
The official statement released by Xinhua did not confirm which family members the reporter interviewed in her stories.
A reporter in the Heilongjiang branch of Xinhua, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Global Times Wednesday that Yan no longer works as a reporter, but said he does not know what position she has been switched to.
"After reading those stories I feel there is nothing important happening in China apart from her family issues," an Internet user jibed on tianya.cn.
Zhou Qing'an, a researcher of communication studies at Tsinghua University, told the Global Times Wednesday that the reporter lacks professional ethics required to be a reporter.
"Being selective in choosing interviewees and keeping a certain distance from interviewees in order to be objective are the basic requirements for a reporter," said Zhou.
Go to Forum >>0 Comments