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James Fallows

James Fallows - James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States, and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. His latest book, China Airborne, will be published in May.
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James Fallows is based in Washington as a national correspondent for The Atlantic. He has worked for the magazine for nearly 30 years and in that time has also lived in Seattle, Berkeley, Austin, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, and Beijing. He was raised in Redlands, California, received his undergraduate degree in American history and literature from Harvard, and received a graduate degree in economics from Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. In addition to working for The Atlantic, he has spent two years as chief White House speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, two years as the editor of US News & World Report, and six months as a program designer at Microsoft. He is an instrument-rated private pilot. He is also now the chair in U.S. media at the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, in Australia.

Fallows has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award five times and has won once; he has also won the American Book Award for nonfiction and a N.Y. Emmy award for the documentary series Doing Business in China. He was the founding chairman of the New America Foundation. His two most recent books, Blind Into Baghdad (2006) and Postcards From Tomorrow Square (2009), are based on his writings for The Atlantic; he is at work on another book about China. He is married to Deborah Fallows, author of the recent book Dreaming in Chinese. They have two married sons.

Fallows welcomes and frequently quotes from reader mail sent via the "Email" button below. Unless you specify otherwise, we consider any incoming mail available for possible quotation -- but not with the sender's real name unless you explicitly state that it may be used. If you are wondering why Fallows does not use a "Comments" field below his posts, please see previous explanations here and here.
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Reading comprehension quiz: China, media, Murdoch

By James Fallows

Aug 2 2007, 10:58 PM ET

Study the picture below for as long as you like, before answering two reading-comprehension questions after the jump. It shows two papers that arrived on the same day here in Shanghai. The one at the top is the state-controlled China Daily. The one at the bottom is the Asian edition of the not-yet-Murdoch-controlled Wall Street Journal.


_


Now, the quiz:



1) Which of the contradictory headlines do you find more credible: "Foreign media enjoy greater access," from China Daily; or "Foreign media say freedoms still lack," from the WSJ?


2) Extra-credit bonus question: What are the odds that stories like the two shown in the WSJ -- the one on the right, by Mei Fong, about complaints from foreign journalists, the one on the left, by the Washington Post's Edward Cody, about how the Chinese government suppressed coverage of a huge explosion in a mining town -- will be in the paper two years from now? Additional credit for answering the question in this way: in the future, how will readers tell the difference between China Daily and the WSJ?


Homework suggestion: If you wonder why #2 is an issue, do refresher work with, for instance, this recent Jack Shafer column in Slate or this long Atlantic profile of Murdoch four years ago, by me.

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