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Asia Buzz: Headline News
Earthquakes, people power, self-immolation - what's a journalist to do?
By ANTHONY SPAETH
January 29, 2001
Web posted at 5:00 p.m. Hong Kong time, 4:00 a.m. EDT
The calendar hasn't even hit February, and yet 2001 already seems so old. We've had two major earthquakes on opposite sides of the globe, scandal-linked cabinet resignations in Japan, People Power in the Philippines and the odd immolation in China's Tiananmen Square. If Mt. Fuji and Mt. Merapi bury Tokyo and Jakarta in lava sometime soon, I'd suggest we've had enough news for the year -- and we should all go home to the DVD player.
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Monday, January 22, 2001
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ASIAWEEK |
Intelligence
The story behind today's news from the editors of Asiaweek
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Of course, that's not a realistic option for any journalist anywhere, even -- and this may come as a surprise -- for our colleagues at the People's Daily. It may not be the newsiest publication, but the paper's crack scribes are on daily, hair-trigger alert in case a massive vilification campaign is required against the spiritual Falun Gong group, former Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui or U.S. trade representative Charlene Barshefsky.
Imagine if the scribes were home snoozing through Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon this week when Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gao Xingjian arrives in Hong Kong. Gao will undoubtedly call for greater freedoms in China -- while standing on Chinese soil -- and if the People's Daily isn't on the ball, who else will call him a turtle's egg or the biggest traitor in 1,000 millenniums? Imagine the competition in the People's Daily newsroom. Could this be the kind of week in which a humble-but-sparky cub reporter with the most peppery prose manages to snag the big job: Epithet Editor?
We at TIME produce 52 issues a year, and for a very good reason: we've sold 52 issues worth of advertisements. And although surveys confirm that readers are crying out for magazines with nothing but ads, we're holding out for traditional journalistic values. Namely, everything should be done at the very last minute with lots of red wine and newsroom rancor. In addition, we should print some news. Call us traditionalists, call us old-fashioned, call us mortgage-holders with kids about to go to college. (And do call if you hear of any good cushy jobs in PR)
Television, being a newer medium, is more open to fresh ideas, as evidenced by the programs being whipped-up by our sister company, Cable News Network (CNN). The Tap Light Show with Anthony Andrews will feature 24-hours of new uses for that clever invention from Australia. (Or, as the advertisement goes, if you watch the first 16 hours, you get the next eight for free.) The first installment will demonstrate how Tap Lights are excellent replacements for automobile headlights. The Miracle Foot Repair Hour with Jerrold Kessel, former deputy Jerusalem bureau chief, is being billed as the first program on CNN that's fully safe for diabetics. In a genuine tug of the envelope, CNN is also considering a late-night, adult-oriented program called The Two-and-a-Half-Hour Air Bed.
Back to the original point: has 2001 already run out of news? What does it matter when the world has the World Economic Forum and its yearly get-together in Davos, Switzerland? It was once a sloshy meeting of junket-loving businessmen in a mediocre ski resort. But sometime in the mid-1990s, the media got intrigued, and who could blame us: what kind of perverse magic brought Bill Gates and Kofi Annan together to eat fried cheese? The answer was slow in coming, but fame made Davos even weirder. Now it was former Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin eating fried cheese with renowned international columnist Flora Lewis and CNN's Bernard Shaw.
This year Davos managed to stay in the news because a band of protesters showed up to object to all that highfalutin cheese-sharing and, although it's all rather difficult to comprehend, the protesters seemed to be on the right side. To maintain its high profile, though, the World Economic Forum will have to pick up some new tricks, like importing topless starlets from the Cannes Film Festival, the more rugged the better. Or, perhaps, provide some real news. A cheese volcano would be fun.
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