International Law

Foreign Ministry Goes After CNN?s Cafferty

By Stan

The Chinese Foreign Ministry demanded Tuesday that CNN’s Jack Cafferty apologize for remarks he made last week, in which he called the Chinese "goons and thugs" and said products manufactured in China are "junk."

"Cafferty used the microphone in his hands to slander China and the Chinese people (and) seriously violated professional ethics of journalism and human conscience," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said Tuesday, according to China’s state-run Xinhua news agency.

She said Cafferty’s remarks "reflected his arrogance, ignorance and hostility towards the Chinese people, ignited indignation of Chinese (at) home and abroad and will be condemned by those who safeguard justice around the world." (story ran on CNN, actually)

Not a good use of time and effort for the Foreign Ministry to complain about Jack Cafferty. He is (sort of) a commentator and regularly complains about all sorts of things, using quite blunt language. I disagree with his statements here, which generalize unnecessarily, but that’s what commentators do. That’s what I do.

Having seen/read some of Cafferty’s more colorful statements about the Bush Administration over the past few years, it is obvious that he does not speak for CNN.

Full disclosure: I’m a big fan of Cafferty. He’s generally a fair-minded populist type, unlike the xenophobic CNN populist Lou Dobbs.

Tim Johnson has the text of the official apology.

Full post as published by China Hearsay on April 16, 2008 (boomark / email).