If you believe that China Daily has journalistic credibility, I’m about to challenge that belief. Or if you believe that China Daily is completely outside of the field of actual journalism, this won’t surprise you at all.

I was recently interviewed by China Daily and the article was published yesterday. I’m frustrated that they inserted so many fake quotes that they claim were said by me, many of which aren’t even correct English. I’m quite certain that what they did was speak to me and then approximate my words with quotes, in many cases completely changing the meaning of what I said.

Either they don’t how quotes work, or they are free to make up fake quotes at will. I’m guessing it’s the latter.

I don’t entirely blame the author, what with China being ranked #173 out of 179 countries on the Press Freedom Index. The problem is institutional. To be fair, I should add that I have done dozens of interviews of this type and this is the first time that I’ve noticed blatant misquotes throughout the text.

This article came to my attention when a stranger in another region of China emailed me saying that he read it. Upon reading the article I contacted the reporter and he responded within several hours saying that he would would remove all of the mis-attributed quotes in the online version.