Photo: GT

On Tuesday, Reuters published a report that said a crisis command center for Hong Kong Special Administrative Region had been set up on the mainland, and the official liaison personnel to HKSAR were to be changed, citing as the source "people familiar with the matter".

"People familiar with the matter" has become probably the most common source of information about Hong Kong in Western media reports, which are characterized by hearsay and rumors. Their reports have no source, and no clue about what is really going on.

Such unverified reports are harmful to a media outlet's credibility, and Reuters is not the only Western media outlet that has been guilty of the practice when reporting on Hong Kong. On Nov 22, in an interview, US-based Fox News said that there were "a million soldiers standing outside of Hong Kong" and the city "would have been obliterated in 14 minutes".

Come on! Does Fox News know how much land it would take to station a million soldiers? Please check before broadcasting such a hyperbolic claim someone has made in an interview.

The above-mentioned are just two of the maybe thousands of absurd fake reports that Western media outlets have made about Hong Kong in the past five months.

On Nov 11, Associated Press reported that a Hong Kong police officer shot a rioter as breaking news. However, AP never mentioning the latter tried to grab the gun from the police officer. They have even edited on-site video clips to mislead viewers.

Worse, AP noticed "a patch of what looked like dried blood" in the video clip, without ever telling readers there was another police officer there beside the "dried blood", trying to help the shot rioter.

The cause of the reports is obvious: Deeply rooted bias and prejudice against China. However, their fake news ruses will fail. We live in an age in which everybody has a microphone, and their rumors will not have legs.

Certain Western media outlets are rather adept at attracting eyeballs by hyping things up out of nothing. But doing so only draws attention to the lack of truth and neutrality in their reporting.