Thanks, AP

Here is the kind of thing we need the media here to do more often. These two paragraphs are from an AP report on the World Games:

"Ma has been telling Taiwanese that Beijing accepts his claim that Taiwan and China can agree to differ on whether the two sides belong to the same country, but the Chinese delegation's no-show has contradicted that," said Lo, who generally supports the pro-independence opposition. "This will lead people to question the legitimacy of Ma's statements."

But fellow political scientist George Tsai of Taipei's Chinese Culture University – usually a supporter of the government – said that China had shown goodwill by allowing Ma to preside over the opening ceremony.

Such clear identifications of commentators' political allegiances are not always to be found in media presentations on Taiwan. Just consider all the pieces from the 2008 Presidential election that sourced Philip Yang as "a political scientist at NTU" or similar without mentioning where his political allegiances lay: Bloomberg, NYTimes, WaPo, LATimes, Straits Times....

...until the NY Times finally noted near the end of the campaign that Yang advised the Ma campaign. Yang later took a position with Ma's National Security Council.
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Daily Links:

• US wins gold at World Games in fastest growing sport in the US. Nope, it ain't el futbol.
• Kerim F has made a big PDF containing every chapter of Tonio Andrade's wonderful history book How Taiwan became Chinese.
• Here's a great post about blogging from a couple of months back that uses me as an example... although I must disgree with the dictum to write short, pithy posts. Glenn Greenwald writes long involved analytical posts, and so do many other popular bloggers. For me the whole point of blogging is to provide an alternative to the lack of context that is the unavoidable problem with pithiness in the media.
• Interactive Dictator Games at the Hall With Two Names.

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