Remember when CNN's Jack Cafferty calling the Chinese "thugs" and "goons," spent a week clarifying his statements — he was talking about the government, not the Chinese people — and then, like Sharon Stone, got slapped with a lawsuit wanting more than $1 billion in damages? It was an incident that the cable network hoped would live and die in April. And it should have. But then the Olympics happened, and CNN had to send correspondents to Beijing to, like, cover it and stuff. But while the media may have moved on to more substantial scandals, the Chinese have not. Which is why it sucks to work for CNN while working in China right now.

Craig Simons, the Asia bureau chief for Cox Newspapers, said that a cab driver this month had asked him if he worked for CNN. Mr. Simons said he did not. The cabbie declared that he would have refused to carry him if he had. “We were on Second Ring Road, in heavy traffic, and he said he’d pull over right there and drop me on the shoulder,” Mr. Simons wrote in an e-mail.

[NYO]