卫报 谁造了“奥运禁带圣经”的谣？

这个报道势不可挡。令人不可容忍。它包含了无神论共产主义者的宗教压制。右翼政治和宗教网站的评论版立即吸引了大量注意力。问题是这不是真的。

　　保守派的《纽约太阳报》在最近一篇社论中援引了天主教新闻服务（Catholic News Service，CNS）宣称中国政府会禁止运动员携带圣经参加即将举行的北京奥运的报道，引爆了这场混乱。众多右翼博客所在的Pajamas Media跟进一篇报道，同样援引CNS，并补充了奇怪的挑刺“如果这是真的”。

　　事实上，这篇报道，援引一份意大利体育新闻作为消息来源，似乎来自天主教新闻社（Catholic News Agency，CNA），一个有着传统宗教观点的完全不同的机构。报道从来没有得到CNS的刊登。

　　然后CNS用它几乎还是新的网站“天主教新闻中心（CNS New Hub）”做了一些了不起的事情。它强烈而有说服力地否认曾发表这样的报道，并把可疑的责任归于CNA和那份意大利报纸，然后接着详细说明关于圣经禁令的报道没有实质内容。

　　CNS的执行编辑拉基（Jim Lackey）表示，“我们知道，鉴于互联网和博客的速度，有必要做这样的事情，这不是我们对报道的感受。我们只是纠正纪录。”

　　顺便说一下，事实上，圣经在中国自由流通。中国政府的一份官方声明表示它希望运动员携带圣经仅供个人使用，但没有禁令。

　　事实上，中国的奥运组织者表示奥运村没有圣经限制。后来，那份意大利报纸的记者没什么说服力地为自己的报道辩护，声称对“任何用于宗教或政治活动或展示的小册子和材料”的禁令指的是圣经——尽管中国人之前已经发表澄清，把禁止的类别改为“宣传材料”。

　　CNS并没能终止这阵激动。互联网上的争论似乎没完没了。但CNS通过网络清楚否认那是自它的报道，而不是在后来发布弥补报道（这可能永远也无法赶上原先的错误），这种做法可能触及了一些东西。

　　例如，许多美国人仍然相信萨达姆要为世贸中心的袭击负责，尽管六年来压倒性的证据证明了相反的事实；或者认为他拥有大规模杀伤性武器，尽管六年来没有发现任何这样的武器。

　　美联社的国家编辑图兰（Brian Toolan）问道“他们只是错了还是他们心照不宣地制造理由？”“我不知道答案”。

　　美联社作为是由各成员单位联合组成的合作型通讯社，没有自己的网站，因此它不能完全效仿CNS的技术。它的做法总是迅速在电报中纠正错误。

　　但是，在故意误传的时代，这也许无法提供原本意图提供的澄清。在传统的、大市场的新闻机构，选择是有限的。图兰表示，如果一个消息来源是误传或撒谎，“你被迫回过头来纠正”。

　　可能相对细小的天主教电报服务已经开始了一个有趣的想法。如果新闻机构，从报纸到网站到电视新闻，维持一个关注错误的网站，那会有什么问题呢？（原标题：中国真的禁止圣经吗？作者：Richard Aregood）

So did China really ban Bibles?

Beijing denied a story about an Olympic Bible ban spread by the rightwing media but it was actually a Catholic news service that shut it down

The story had everything going for it. It was outrageous. It was emotionally laden. It involved suppression of religion by godless communists. The flurry of attention in the comments section of rightwing political and religious websites was instantaneous. The problem was that it wasn't true.

A recent editorial in the conservative New York Sun kicked off the fuss by citing a report from the Catholic News Service asserting that the Chinese government would bar athletes from bringing Bibles to the upcoming Beijing Olympic Games. Pajamas Media, home of many a rightwing blog, followed up with a report, also citing CNS, and adding the strange cavil "if true".

Actually, the report, citing an Italian sports newspaper as a source, seems to have come from the Catholic News Agency, a totally different operation with a traditional religious outlook, one that features the text of the Pope's Sunday Angelus prayer and a "saint of the day." It was never carried by the Catholic News Service.

Then the Catholic News Service did something remarkable, using its nearly-new website, CNS News Hub. It strongly and convincingly denied ever running such a story and gave the dubious credit to CNA and the Italian paper, then went on to say in detail that there was no substance to the story about a Bible ban.

"We know that with the speed of the Internet and blogs that there was a need to do something like this," said Jim Lackey, the managing editor of CNS. "It's not our feelings about a story. We are just correcting the record."

He added: "When we started getting phone calls from Congressmen and from the state department asking 'what more can you tell me about your story?,' we decided to post the facts as we know them."

The facts, by the way, are that Bibles circulate freely in China, despite the Chinese government's bad record on religion and human rights. An official Chinese government statement said that it would prefer that athletes bring Bibles for personal use only, but stopped well short of a ban.

In fact, Olympic organisers in China said there would be no restrictions on Bibles in the Olympic village. Later, the reporter for the Italian newspaper unconvincingly defended his story by asserting that a ban on "pamphlets and materials used for any religious or political activity or display" meant Bibles, even after the Chinese issued a clarification changing the banned category to "promotional materials".

CNS did not end the flap. Internet controversies seem never to end, especially those that can be kept alive by people whose beliefs run deep. But CNS may have hit on something by clearly disclaiming a story via the web rather than distributing a counterbalancing story later that may never catch up with the original error.

Many Americans, for instance, still believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Centre, despite six years of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, or that he had weapons of mass destruction, despite none having been found over those same six years.

"Were they simply wrong or did they knowingly build a case?," asks Brian Toolan, national editor of the Associated Press, of the Bush administration. "I don't know the answer".

The AP, being a cooperative of its member news outlets, has no website of its own, so it could not completely duplicate the CNS technique. Its practice has always been to quickly correct errors or misstatements on its wire.

But in the era of deliberate misrepresentation, that might not provide the clarification that it is intended to provide. Rudy Giuliani, the candidate for the Republican nomination, has let go with a couple of whoppers in the last couple of weeks, first claiming incorrectly that the British National Health Service has a markedly worse record for prostate cancer survival than is actually the case. Then, providing heavily cooked statistics, he claimed the disgraced Bernard Kerik, his former police commissioner, had been responsible for as much as eliminating crime in New York City.

In traditional, big market journalism, the choices are limited. If a source misrepresents or lies, Toolan said, "You are compelled to go back and correct." For serial offenders, you have to hope that reporters "instinctively and instantly go back and check everything".

Maybe the relatively tiny Catholic wire service has the beginning of an interesting idea. What would be the problem with media outlets, from newspapers to websites to television news, maintaining a website that focuses on mistakes - especially the flat out lies that they have carried?