The opinion piece was written by Walter Russell Mead, a professor at Bard College and a scholar at the Hudson Institute. It criticized China’s initial response to the coronavirus outbreak as well as the state of the country’s financial markets. (Mr. Mead declined to comment.)
The expression “sick man of Asia” was a derogatory characterization of China’s weaknesses in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when it was torn by internal divisions and exploited by foreign powers.
Top editors held two meetings with newsroom staffers to discuss the headline and the potential impact on the The Journal’s China operations, according to three people with knowledge of the events that preceded the ouster of the journalists. The headline was widely considered offensive within the newsroom, these people said, and was even coming up when staffers went out in the field to interview sources.
In one meeting last week, said one of the people, reporters expressed their anger over the headline to Mr. Murray, the editor. Mr. Murray agreed that the headline was bad, this person said, and agreed to talk to Paul Gigot, who runs the The Journal’s editorial page. However, Mr. Murray cautioned that his hands were tied because of the traditional separation between the news and editorial sides of the The Journal.
Mr. Lewis, the Dow Jones C.E.O., participated in a more recent meeting. Newsroom staffers again pushed to get top editors to change the headline.
The Chinese government has publicly complained about the piece several times since it was published on Feb. 3. At a Foreign Ministry news conference last week, a spokeswoman said the article “belittled our efforts to fight against the epidemic,” was “racially discriminatory and sensational” and hurt the feelings of its people.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/19/business/media/china-wall-street-journal.html
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