An editor at China’s top government news agency Xinhua appears to have translated the title of an online video clip all too literally.
On Tuesday, the state-run media group published a photo gallery of 38 images that it alleged showed an execution carried out in the United States. The images, in fact, were screen grabs from a pornographic film called Lethal Injection.
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The sequence of shots shows a scantily clad woman being strapped to a chair and writhing about dramatically, before a sleazy looking pony-tailed “doctor” enters the room to inject a dark liquid into her arm. The woman again flails histrionically and appears to die – what likely happens next in the original film is left to the imagination.
Chinese daily Global Times – known for its conservative and nationalistic bent – also ran a version of the slideshow on its homepage, under the headline: “Record of a Female Inmate’s Execution: Exposing the World’s Darkest Side.”
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A blogger who writes under the title “Out of My Face” was the first to identify the true provenance of the footage. Both slideshows have since been removed.
It’s not the first time a porn film has accidentally been given a very public airing in China. Last month, a technician in the country’s Jilin Province began watching an erotic movie on his laptop, not realizing it was still connected to a enormous jumbotron hanging above a crowded train station outside.
