Last Saturday morning, when I leafed through the pages of a local English newspaper in an open-air coffee shop in downtown Singapore, a story headline cried out for my attention: "Olympics hostesses: No wide butts please."
The headline did its job well. It both enticed me to read the story and told me exactly what the one-column, seven-paragraph story was about.
The wire-service dispatch with a Beijing dateline listed "no big bottoms" as one of the main criteria for the aspiring hostesses for next year's Olympic Games' medal ceremonies. The reason was that "big bottoms could stick out too much," the story said, attributing the source as a State media that had quoted officials who were selecting candidates for medal ceremonies and other protocol activities.
But I doubted that any Chinese officials would ever have made such a public remark. I decided to get to the bottom of the bottoms story by tracing it back to the original version in the Beijing News, the State media identified in the story.
It turned out the Chinese newspaper had only interviewed Li Ning, a former journalist and now educator who operates a privately-owned training program in secretarial services and social courtesies. Although Li might have acted as a guest judge in the selection process, she was certainly not one of the Olympic officials.
By the way, the Beijing News, one of the capital's metropolitan papers, is different from traditional State media in that it is market-oriented and more concerned about selling copies and ad space.
According to this paper, Li said that following the opinions of the experts involved in the making of selection standards, the candidates should have uniform body shape, "for example, bottoms shouldn't be too wide." That was her only comment related to the butts.
But after being paraphrased in the foreign coverage, Li said that "experts were looking for women of uniform height with neat bottoms" and "we do not want any wide bottoms".
When I double checked with Li, she denied having made these remarks and said she was not authorized to speak in an official capacity.
Obviously, the no-big-bottoms story had somehow over-dramatized Li's remark and exaggerated it by implying official involvement.
As we know, while the press plays the role of constructing the reality of the outside world for readers, most of them will be unable to check the authenticity of information because the press is their primary source for information on foreign affairs.
Put simply, news media can offer opportunities for getting new information, but it can also limit people's perspectives on a foreign event, through their ways of representing "reality".
This seems to be exactly what has been happening since the foreign media picked up the story.
According to postings on the website of the Singapore newspaper, readers' reactions to the story mostly veered between disgust and anger.
One reader calls the alleged requirements "perverse expectations," adding that "it's vanity writ large in the hands of a smug minority, be they officials or fashion trend-setters."
Another reader thinks that "it smacks of a propagandist mindset still haunting China," and "their idea of 'respectability' is to standardize these women -- disrespecting nature's diversity of body types".
But even the most biased person in China would probably not agree that the selection of the women candidates is an exercise of propaganda, or a no-holds-barred use of communication to propagate specific beliefs and expectations.
Although the damage is already done, not all is lost if the controversy arising from the story reminds the news media of their professional obligation to report the facts accurately, which usually implies being objective, and avoiding stereotypes and unsubstantiated allegations.
Email:yuanzhou@chinadaily.com.cn
