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Asia Buzz: Hold the Front Page
Where bad news is good news
By ANTHONY SPAETH
September
11, 2000
Web posted at 11:30 a.m. Hong Kong time, 11:30 p.m. EDT
At the United Nations in New York, 156 world leaders gathered to attend a Millennium Summit, and boy has that caused a lot of work for us in the news business. Foreign editors have toiled to remove the same repetitive sentence from stories streaming in from virtually everywhere: "While he attended the United Nations Millennium Summit in New York, woes continued to pile up at home for [nation name] President [or Prime Minister, Strongman, Joker-in-Chief, etc.] So-and-so..." Photo editors were bombarded with pictures, but never the ones they really wanted: of Bill Clinton shaking hands with Fidel Castro, for example, or Philippine President Joseph Estrada and Muammar Gaddafi of Libya exchanging Pampers boxes filled with ransom money. Front-page editors held space for news that never came.
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The front page of my Saturday newspaper, New Delhi's 'Asian Age,' had a photo of a policeman being attacked by two pit bulls in North Carolina bearing the wry headline: "Dog Bites Man." (In the peculiarly blase Indian manner, a story about seven people killed by a bomb in a Lahore market was tucked away on page four.) Which just goes to prove -- for I think I've heard this somewhere before -- that the news media is obsessed with bad news, even if they sometimes put the really bad stuff on page four in favor of North Carolina pit bull attacks on page one.
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The story behind today's news from the editors of Asiaweek
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Take that same issue of The Asian Age. India doesn't have any greater share of bad news than other countries on the planet -- at least on a per capita basis, and especially if you turn a blind eye to bus crashes that kill unlikely hundreds of people -- but just look at the stories printed on Saturday. Does anyone really want to know about a 22-year-old physically handicapped woman who claimed to be raped in a moving vehicle by three strangers, including a political personage -- but is apparently lying, according to the New Delhi police? (That article got a headline reading "Spotlight") Is there anything interesting about a scientist from one of India's nuclear research institutes withdrawing a penknife in a courtroom in Mumbai and threatening to commit suicide? (He was arrested for doing so, poor man.) Must we read about a local terrorist group apologizing for the murder of a scholar who, it turned out, wasn't the police informer they thought he was? (Those are polite terrorists.)
There's no respite from the awful news -- even on the weather page.
Especially on the weather page, in fact. It was 35 degrees Celsius
Friday, with 86% humidity. It's a wonder to me personally that people
have the fortitude to go to court to threaten suicide or to the market
to lob bombs. I don't.
Which is exactly why the media should pay true
attention to such worthy efforts as 156 world leaders tying up New
York traffic to celebrate the millennium, which is an arbitrary measure
of time consisting of 1,000 years. These men and women are looking
ahead to the future, and not just because the past millennium had
The Inquisition, The Holocaust, The Black Plague and, in a single
century, ""Que Sera Sera" and "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida." They want the
future to be prosperous for themselves, their political parties or
military regimes, their countries and their people. (Precisely in
that order.) Nearly 150 of those statesmen want torrid the world of
nuclear weapons. (The others are a different story altogether.) And
they want photos of themselves on the front pages of their home newspapers
standing at the podium at the United Nations saying stern, but hopeful,
things. With the exception, however, of India's Prime Minister Atal
Behari Vajpayee, who stepped up to the U.N. podium to -- well, to
sit down. (He has health problems.) Vajpayee had some tough words
for neighboring Pakistan, but that's neither good news nor bad. In
fact, we in the trade call that a "Dog Bites Man" story.
The media should shift its spotlight to positive news, such as the 7,000 tons of kangaroo steaks prepared for the 156 world leaders. (Or was that for the Olympic athletes in Sydney?) Instead of concentrating on torn-up parking tickets and 156 really wiped-out mini-bars, why haven't we read about the First Spouses and whether they caught "Cats" -- after which they would inevitably go home to plump for a revival of their own national cultures? And what about those brave national leaders who stayed home to enjoy their woes piling up? Did you see anything about them on television? (He was in Belize, I think.)
I'm looking for good news from now on. Especially -- whew! -- on the weather page.
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