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Dongfang Zaobao's exclusive interview, plagiarized from Interfax

You're a journalist working at the Dongfang Zaobao newspaper in Shanghai. You get up one morning with a hangover and go to a press conference about 'China's engineering achievements'. It's pretty boring stuff, and your head is pounding, so you don't ask any questions, you just hold your head and groan.

You go back to your editorial office and start freaking out, because you didn't ask any questions, and you don't really know what to write. And then you get an idea!

You start the report with the following sentence: "National Forestry Bureau spokesman gave an exclusive interview to this newspaper's journalist". Then you just write all the questions that an Interfax journalist asked at the press conference together with the spokesman's answers. Hey presto, you've done your work for the day and can go home to nurse your hangover.

Of course, the way Dongfang Zaobao reports the press conference is a little different from Interfax's article. Compare and contrast the two headlines:

Interfax: Yangtze to be as bad as Yellow River within ten years - experts 

Dongfang Zaobao: Will the Yangtze will become a second Yellow River? Absolutely not!

The Interfax report in English is here, the Dongfang Zoabao report in Chinese was here but seems to have been replaced with another article.

UPDATE: The South China Morning Post picks up on Dongfang Zaobao's lead, with an article entitled Officials deny dam will turn Yangtze into 'second Yellow River' which you can find on the Three Gorges Probe website here.

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