MCLC: sex toy fools reporter and town

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Kevin Lawrence <klawrence at chinainstitute.org>
Subject: sex toy fools reporter and town
***********************************************************

I don't know how "cultural" this might be for the MCLC list, but it's a
pretty humorous media story. Here's a Chinese news report:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yia27nBTgfk&feature=player_embedded

Kevin

============================================

Source: ABC News (6/19/12):
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/06/sex-toy-fools-entire-chinese-
village/?fb_ref=abc-fb-recs

The discovery of a double-headed sex toy mistaken for a mystical rare
fungus brought national notoriety to a Chinese village and TV program this
week.

Villagers from Liucunbu, a rural community outside western Chinese city of
Xi¹an, encountered the sex toy while drilling a new well shaft.
Hard-pressed to identify the flexible, fungi-like object, perplexed
residents alerted the local news station, which immediately sent reporter
Yunfeng Ye to the scene.

In her coverage of the finding, broadcast last Sunday on the station¹s
investigative journalism program Xi¹an Up Close, Ye thoroughly probed
different aspects of the discovery, interviewing locals and inserting her
own research on the alleged mushroom. Despite Ye¹s earnest reporting, her
and the villagers¹ obliviousness of the object¹s real identity has now
lent itself to national amusement.

The report opens with Ye proclaiming the discovery of the mysterious
object, the likes of which ³not even an 80-year-old local man has seen.²
Villagers crouch around the object, floating innocently in a water-filled
bucket. ³It has an eye and a nose, but we don¹t know what it is,² says a
man who was among the drillers who discovered the sex toy.

Describing the object¹s qualities in explicit detail, Ye and the villager
determine that it is a type of lingzhi, a shelf fungus of the Ganoderma
lucidum species, which according to legend has the ability to give
immortality. Asserting that the mushroom is rarely seen because it grows
underground, she says, ³When the Emperor Qin Shi Huang [the First emperor
of China] was on the hunt for the secret to longevity, it is said he
discovered this lingzhi was the answer.²

After the program aired, many viewers immediately recognized the object as
a sex toy modeled after female genitalia, and online video of the report
gained millions of views overnight. While the video received many comments
lauding the station¹s and villagers¹ ³purity,² the day after the program
aired the Xi¹an news station posted an apology on Sina Weibo, a Chinese
blogging website.

³Our program last night made everyone laugh,² the apology said, expressing
regret for an ³uncomfortable and misleading² report. ³Our reporter is very
young and sheltered.²