In the wake of yesterday's post, “CNOOC's Unocal Bid Kindles Shadowy Media and Influence Warfare”, an AFX journalist has contacted me to defend AFX's editorial integrity and to suggest that plain, old-fashioned journalistic initiative rather than the shadowy tentacles of CNOOC might have been responsible for the AFX story I referred to. It's a fair cop. Although I qualified my suspicion of the origins of the story, I was a bit inflammatory and conspiratorial. And I missed one very important detail (more on that below). 

Rather than paraphrase the note I was sent, I'll include the relevant parts, since its quite interesting:

I'm actually one of those AFX guys. Trust me, none of us are tools of of the state, There's no state censor on either HK or Beijing desks and we still co-operate closely with AFP locally and share copy with AFX Europe and Marketwatch services. I've never been contacted by anyone from Xinhua (except when at media events, the xinhua/cctv/china daily reporters tend to interview the foreign press.. a lot, I'd find it creepy if the reporters weren't so cute.).

The item you note is a pickup from the FT in London. Generally we'll scour the FT, AWSJ, SCMP, HK Standard and a range of papers in the morning for anything China-related. Cnooc/Unocal is one of the bigger stories, so it was a natural pick-up.

Yeah, the FT item could have been inspired by a tip from one of the interested parties, but I'm more inclined to think it was just initative on the part of the reporter. It's all public information so it's not too difficult an item to put together.

Fair enough. (But why aren't the cute Xinhua and CCTV journalists coming to interview foreign flacks, too? Maligned again.)

Now that important detail. The AFX journalist also pointed out that their wire story was taken from Financial Times coverage (it's there in black and white in the story I linked to), proving that flacks can read between the lines, but not the actual lines themselves. The citation of an “unidentified person close to CNOOC” doesn't do much to alleviate suspicion of the original source of the story, but few people would name the FT if being asked to list media organizations in the thrall of the Chinese state.

I wrote yesterday that the default setting of PR people is to parse all media content (even blogs) for agendas and lines of influence. In this media soaked era, I stand by the importance of doing that. I also stand by the assertion that there will be a vast PR and lobbying war over this deal because of its politically charged nature, and that coverage of it, including the stories cited in yesterday's post, should be read in that context.

But as someone who is good friends with many Chinese and foreign journalists from independent, state-affiliated and global media, I am also happy to concede that the world is full of bright, talented reporters who are perfectly capable of assembling a killer story with no prodding at all from the dire land of flackery.

I apologize to any AFX journalists who were scandalized. Your honor has been well defended.