Hi Gang,
I was corresponding with another expat, in another thread, when he came back to me with something that was way off of what we were talking about. So, accordingly, I went back to check the link that I had provided him with. To my amazement, once I clicked on the English button, the site jumped to an entirely different page. This brought me back to a similar experience I had a couple of years earlier:
I was on a flight from Can Tho to Hanoi, when I picked up the English newspaper. At that time, the interest rate in Vietnam was at 20+ percent. The paper said that the rate had been lowered to 10+ percent. So, when I got back to Can Tho, I asked my Vietnamese banker friends about the new rate and they were like, "Duhhh. This is news. Where did you get it?" I told them about the English newspaper, they all laughed and said something along the line of, "Never pay any attention to such. It is only there to make you guys feel good, feel welcomed."
I later dug up the exact paper and went through it in detail. Sure enough, the article about the rate was not there in its Vietnamese version. I went further and discovered that others, about new-found artifacts and crimes, weren't there as well.
So, if you only read English, please do so with a grain of salt, or two. If you find something that is really important to you, make sure you double check it with a Vietnamese friend. The press, particularly in English, is not quite free yet.
I wonder: If I had banked on the paper's rate information, invested and lost money, would I be able to recover? And from whom? Or, once sounded off, I get in trouble for violating the tabloids' freedom of speech?
Have any of you seen or heard any part of this rather elaborate scheme?
English Readings in Vietnam.
I think it was 6 months before I found out the stories in English versions of news papers had little truth in them compared to the Vietnamese versions. I pretty much stopped reading them after that.
I do occasionally scan them for fun, but like all media throughout the world I take it with a shovel full of salt.
to be fair though if you examine news papers in the west close enough you will often see similar stories with facts n figures differing wildly between them. maybe not quite so much on the interest rates, but certainly on crime and benefits etc.
What's the old saying, he who controls the media, controls the masses thinking....
As an example there was an article on the BBC (UK new site) that stated most British people are wrong about most things, such as crime, immigration, benefit fraud etc. When you consider the biggest selling newspaper is a tabloid known as "The Sun"(predominantly male audience) famed for its semi-nude page 3 and sports news, you can understand the quality of reporting that goes into it. follow that with the most popular online news site is the online versions of "The Daily Mail"(surprisingly predominantly female audience) a right wing bigoted slant on everything that stirs racism and scaremongering amongst its readers.
I always take printed\online news stories with a pinch of salt unless I can cross verify them against other sources.
Here well, I'm more of the opinion as long as I don't bother the government, I don;t think they'll bother with me. Does the news afect my outlook, not really I tend to talk to my VN friends for a more accurate picture of whats going on, than whats being reported.
My wife and I will read VN news together. I read in English, and she will read Vietnamese. It seems like half of the English VN news sites report the same exact stories, and they are not always what is being reported in the VN news sites. There are many times when we talk about news and realize that the topics we are talking about were not even posted in the other language.
But in this day and age--the time of smart phones, tiny video cameras and crowded forums such as this one? How long will this top-handed approach work, if at all?
At least in other places, there are sources for you to go to for accurate information. But in Vietnam, if you don't have knowledgable Vietnamese friends, where do you go? What about these knowledgable Vietnamese guys, where do they get their tea cups filled?
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