The Flowers (花儿乐队) is quite an infamous pop band from mainland China. Three years ago, New Century Weekly magazine (新世纪周刊) revealed that the band plagiarized 13 songs in 2 albums published from 2004 to 2005. Since then, the band have never quite gotten out from under that crowd. Last month, they announced that they were disbanding.

You might think, they deserved this, didn’t they? Probably. But, sometimes some players in the industry can be even more shameless than the bands.

Two days ago, we spotted this 7:09 video clip edited by a Chinese portal website. The video implied that Zhang Wei (张伟), the former lead singer of The Flowers, couldn’t focus on the anchors’ questions at all because of some mysterious reasons. Then the Internet users kept asking, did he use drugs? Was he stoned? Then most users gave nods to these answers without doubt.

A depressed pop singer with drug problems… It makes sense! Yesterday, the Chinese portal website who edited the video picked “Zhang Wei using drugs” as their default search keyword on the front page:

Now everyone will have the impression that Zhang Wei used drugs, got fucked up, couldn’t concentrate in a video interview, and his career is doomed. It’s been proved by the video and the default keyword, right?

No. It’s so not right.

Hours ago, a Youku user uploaded a full edition of the 26:33 video interview recorded from the portal website’s webcast live stream. It tells a very different story.

Full version: Da Peng (大鹏), the anchor from the portal website, started the live video interview with some provoking behaviors (loud dry coughs) and unfriendly words - “Artists couldn’t get up early… because you have amusing nightlives!” “You can use your new album cover to decorate Hot Pot restaurants” Then the anchor kept sowing discord among Zhang Wei and his new band members. Of course, the anchor didn’t miss the plagiarism event in 2006.

Now you can imagine how a young artist (without great education, especially on PR skills) would react to this kind of provocation - express his anger. But Zhang Wei expressed his anger in a very weird way - pretending to be deaf and wandering.

As a result, two jerks pissed off each other, one stayed to play an ass hole, one left the interview, then the one who controlled the media set up the other, by editing the video interview in a misleading way and sending it to media partners. “Throwing rocks at someone in the well” - this Chinese idiom is proper here to describe how the portal website manipulated the whole farce.

(DIS)CLAIMER: I’m not a fan of The Flowers. I don’t even like them at all.