As recently as February, Mr. Walz said on a podcast that he had been in Hong Kong, then a British colony, “on June 4 when Tiananmen happened,” and decided to cross into mainland China to take up his teaching duties even though many people were urging him not to.
But it was not true. Mr. Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, indeed taught at a high school in China as part of a program sending American teachers abroad, but he did not actually travel to the country until August 1989.
Why bother making something like this up?
Hey, don’t give them too much credit here. They assigned two writers to write a story about something Minnesota Public Radio covered. Except MPR just talked about the exaggeration for a couple sentences, because it wasn’t a particularly important fact in a larger segment about Walz and China. You need big journalism to figure out a way to expand second-hand reporting to a full length article.