Perhaps unsurprisingly, a "news media war" has broken out in China over the hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. On one side stand loyal local news outlets, facing an abstract entity commonly known in China as the "foreign media."
The battle, according to a March 29 column in the state-owned Beijing Youth Daily newspaper, is over the how to judge China's role in the investigation of the missing airliner.
News organizations everywhere like to "own" a story, but in China, where the media is mostly state-owned and expected to reflect the political and policy prerogatives of its Communist Party overseers, dominating a story isn't just a journalistic act. It's a political one, and competitors — whether they're owned by rival governments or not — are viewed as driven by similar motivations.