China Daily Messed Up Copy-and-Paste Job

At 20:31 on August 8, 2007, the online edition of China Daily posted an article titled: "China invites the world to Olympics" on its website.  The following sentence appeared: "Security was tight around Tiananmen Square, where troops crushed pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989 with huge loss of life, as crowds gathered for the celebrations.". (See Google Cache's screen capture below).

This came about because someone did a copy-and-paste job from Reuters' Nick Mulvenney (dated 19:54 on the same evening) without checking the content.  Within 12 hours, a revised version was posted (see China Daily).  Someone over at China Daily is in big trouble for this slip-up, because someone assembled the article and someone else approved its publication.  This same story was also carried verbatim at the English-language section of the People's Daily website.  Someone else over there is also in trouble.  This error was noted in the Hong Kong newspapers Apple Daily, Ming Pao, Sing Tao, etc.  In particular, Apple Daily gave a flowchart of the process from Reuters to the China Daily website to the People's Daily website:


 

  


Relevant Link: China Daily Acknowledges Tiananmen Massacre ... For Three Weeks  Austin Ramzy, China Blog (TIME)