City Evening News
June 15, 2009

Fang Jing, the TV anchor who hosted a military program on CCTV until she disappeared from the screen in May, was rumored to have been caught spying for Taiwan. Yesterday, Fang re-emerged on CCTV as the host of another program, putting an end to all the speculation.

Today's City Evening News, a Changchun-based newspaper, featured the story with a big cover photo.

A Yi, the author of the blog post that triggered the whole episode, defended himself by saying that he never explicitly referred to Fang as a "spy." Instead, he claims he said only that Fang had "leaked information to the outside". The vague hint evolved into a full-blown fiction that included such details as how Fang was seduced by a Taiwanese man and accepted money from him.

A Yi's original blog post, which was mainly about cheating on tests, included a line that said that Fang Jing had "applied to host Defense Watch in order to obtain military information to leak to the outside," and that she was arrested on the evening of May 12. In his apology, A Yi said that he should have realized that readers would ignore the test cheating and seize on the secret leaking, regardless of whether it was intended as a joke.

Elsewhere on the Internet, some observers feel that the whole affair was engineered to get Fang back on the air. They reason that CCTV had pulled Fang for an unrelated reason, but once she was said to be a spy, they had to give her another host position to quell the rumors.

In the sidebar, a headline reports that a just-married couple died yesterday after they fell off a cliff in the mountains of Huairou District on the outskirts of Beijing. The newlyweds, who were hiking on a remote stretch of Great Wall with three friends, were reportedly struck by lightning before their fall.

The picture which appears on the right side of the front page is said to be a photo of Kim Jong-un, the son and rumored successor to North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.