A notable instance of one-sided reporting was Xinhua's coverage of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. Finally, last fall, an editor-reporter was dispatched to Sarajevo for a period of two weeks. And finally, late in the summer of 1995, four years into the war, Xinhua set up a small bureau, not in Sarajevo, no, because Xinhua provides no life insurance for its foreign correspondents, but in safer Zagreb. But this is beside the point. But to point out such holes and lopsidedness in coverage is, as it took me a while to learn, to display a profound ignorance of Xinhua's priorities.
Numbers are what the top brass want.
It's the number of stories the agency can crank out day after day, year after year that matters. Each successive president of the Xinhua News Agency seeks to make his mark by increasing the grand annual total of words, words, words. To make sure that this year's total of stories or lines or words will surpass the previous year's, correspondents will sometimes write one fairly long story, then chop it into pieces. Sometimes the quota will have been met midway through the month. Then the foreign expert in Beijing responsible for polishing stories filed from a given bureau may, if new to the job, worriedly inquire if perhaps there's been some sort of communications breakdown.