A Thousand Times No

“Historically, China has always been better known for eating dogs rather than pampering them.”

Which fine journalistic outlet released the statement above earlier this week?

A. The Onion
B. The Colbert Report
C. The Daily Show
D. The New York Times
E. The People’s Daily

If you said “D” (like, Duh), you’d be right on the money. [View and listen to the source here.]

How did the Gray Lady end up dabbling in stereotyping slurs and quasi-yellow journalism? Blame the Internet. In the rush to deploy supplemental audio and visual content on their websites, daily papers release (and implicitly endorse) a surfeit of new material, often with little or no editorial oversight. The political, the personal, and the professional all blur together as journalists with extensive experience in one medium cross over into another.

The Chinese-on-dog statement comes from Ruth Fremson, a staff photographer for the Times. Fremson has won Pulitzers for her work as a photojournalist here in the States and abroad; she was on the scene on 9/11 as the Twin Towers came down. It’s obvious from viewing her work that she is talented and dedicated to her craft. But in listening to her segment on dog owners in Beijing, it’s also clear that she is not trained as a reporter.

For starters, she mispronounces nearly every Chinese name in the piece, from Beijing on down. Though irritating, this is still par for the course among Western journalists. Far more troubling are Fremson’s ill-informed and gross generalizations, such as the howler cited above. Had Fremson made this contention in the first-person voice — “Until now, I had always associated Chinese people with eating dogs, not pampering them,” — the onus for any ignorance or misperception would have been laid squarely at her feet.

Instead, her sweeping statement masquerades as reportage, and that’s where I take issue with this piece. Yes, there are people who eat dogs and there are restaurants that serve dog meat in China. But the vast majority of Chinese people have never consumed dog meat; in a nation of over a billion people, it’s easy to come across statistical outliers of every sort. One could just as easily hold up the very existence of NAMBLA and contend that “historically” America has “always” been known as a nation of pederasts. Wrong.

Another example of the sloppiness of Fremson’s voice-over work is on display when she discusses Huxi, a young woman works as a fashion designer for dogs. Fremson recounts Huxi’s tale of growing up lonely as an only child, mentioning that Huxi “had no playmates” and was “incredibly lonely when she was young.” The caption under a photograph of Huxi indicates that she is 24 years old — in other words, she was born after China’s so-called One-child policy went into effect. If she were born in an urban area like Beijing, millions of her peers would have been only children as well. To contend that the absence of siblings was somehow unusual for a young woman born in China after 1980 is a suprisingly slipshod assertion.

Fremson also notes that in Beijing, “dogs can be seen to be living as well as, or even better than the people in some cases.” How would this be any different from, say, another world-class city like New York or LA? Certainly, the juxtaposition is notable in a society that still purports to uphold Marxist or Maoist ideas, but Fremson doesn’t frame her statement in any meaningful political context. Rather, she gives us bad armchair anthropology, hinting at the dog-eater smear again: “I began to look into why there was such a newfound love for animals.” [Emphasis mine.]

Jill Abrahamson, a managing editor for the Times, notes that reporters’ blogs are not fully edited news stories. “To work and cast a wide appeal, blogs often need more voice than a news story. While we do expect certain journalistic standards to apply to everything we publish, editors can’t be too rigid, either.” There’s informality, and then there’s completely falling down on the job. Let us not forget that this photo essay with accompanying voiceover, loosely clad under the mantle of reportage, still carries the imprimatur of the venerable New York Times.

The Times wouldn’t send Cathy Horyn to shoot photos in Darfur, and wouldn’t send Nick Kristof with a loaded camera bag to the runways of Milan. So why does it make sense to have a photographer, even one as accomplished as Fremson, try to carry off the job of an audio-based reporter? Yes, multimedia content is a new, largely uncharted frontier for papers like the Times. Still, I expect something better than this. A picture may be worth ten thousand words, but ill-chosen words only serve to undermine the value of otherwise well-framed pictures.

Meanwhile, gentle photographers, just shoot me.