Beijing Boyce

Not *those* Scorpions...

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A year ago, we were counting down one month until the Beijing Olympics. A dire mood prevailed as people had trouble getting visas, the media pushed a “no-fun Games” theme, the Fuwa were caught in a sex-tape scandal, and questions lingered as to whether China could keep security, pollution, and logistics under control. Then The Games started and were, well, fun.

Over the next six weeks, I’ll post a half-dozen “Olympic flashbacks“. First up: My one and only media monitoring project, which focused on the predictable widespread coverage of Wangfujing snack street and especially that treat known as scorpions on a stick.

From the BBC to ESPN, from The LA Times to Forbes, from The Washington Post to The Age, reporters couldn’t resist “look at the weird food in Beijing” stories, though some realized that the customers tended to be tourists and journalists rather than this city’s citizens (see below for full list of stories). I gave Dave Barry of the Miami Herald the gold medal for best coverage:

The Chinese people I saw all seemed to be buying things like lamb kebabs and fruit. On the other hand, the people gathered around the centipedes and scorpions on a stick were, in almost every case, tourists or American TV reporters doing fun features on weird Chinese food. These people were basically lining up to eat scorpions. A reporter would hold up a skewer of scorpions, and the camera person would get a close-up shot. Then the reporter would scrunch up his or her face, take a bite of a scorpion, chew, swallow, and declare that it really wasn’t that bad. Then, depending on how in-depth the feature was, the reporter might take a bite of seahorse.

The silver went to Dan Steinberg of the Washington Post (“Foreign media doing scorpions-on-sticks pieces is just about the lamest form of journalism imaginable…. So here’s my version”), while bronzes went to Iain Marlow of The Toronto Star and Chris O’Brien of Forbes.

The media monitoring project kicked off with this post and also covered scorpions in a bottle and scorpions on a cracker. Here is a full list of posts:

• Scorpions on a stick: The medalists
• Scorpions on a stick: This post rocks!
• Scorpions on a stick update: Washington Post, NBC, Miami Herald, and more
• Scorpions in a… bottle?
• Scorpions on a… cracker?
• Scorpions on a stick update: Globe & Mail, LA Times, BBC, DNA India, and more
• Scorpions on a stick update: Forbes, Wall Street Journal
• Scorpions on a stick update: NBC
• On a stick? In Beijing? No way!: ESPN, Boston Globe