The Press: Old Orient Hand

The best daily newspaper in Thailand is edited by a wiry, wearily patient American named Darrell Berrigan. An expatriate newsman and longtime resident of Bangkok. Berrigan got his newspaper last year through an orientally inscrutable tactic—he wrote a magazine article charging that Thailand's chief cop, General Phao Sriyanond, was also Thailand's biggest opium smuggler. General Phao was impressed. With characteristic Thai logic, he apparently reasoned that any newsman intimate enough with the country's boatmen, taxi drivers, prostitutes and businessmen to put together such a report would make an ideal editor. Phao hired Berrigan to edit his newly founded Bangkok World—printed in English, because English is the second tongue of educated Thais and self-respecting Thai strongmen.

Phao was unceremoniously kicked out of the country in 1957. But before he left, he thoughtfully put aside funds—things are like that in Thailand—for Berrigan to keep going until he could scrape together enough money to buy control of the World for himself. Today Berrigan is such a national institution that diplomats phone him openly for guidance, and Thai officials consult him on politics— foreign and domestic. What is more, by his wit and wits, Editor Berrigan has turned his World into one of the genuinely cultured pearls of the East.

Ploy & Counterploy. Publishing an English-language paper in Thailand, Berrigan frequently has to carry the World, Atlas-like, on his back. His 43 Thai compositors handset every word of the ten-page paper, and since they speak no English, regularly speckle the World with gaudy and sometimes bawdy typos. His general manager is a converted taxi driver; his star photographer was once his houseboy. Worst of all. most of Berrigan's Thai reporters cannot write English. After they cover a story, Berrigan has to debrief them in a game of delicate ploy and diffident counterploy. Sample:

Berrigan: Where've you been?

Reporter: We go Sanam Luang [site of an election rally].

Berrigan: What did you do?

Reporter: We look look all the Sanam Luang.

Berrigan: Did you see something?

Reporter: Yes, but I don't know what.

"No one would believe you can run a newspaper this way," muses Expatriate Berrigan. "But it's the most satisfying work I've ever done." Last week, as he patched up staff quarrels over slugs of mekong (raw, locally made liquor), Berrigan could take consolation from the fact that the World was at least regularly in the black, would soon move into new quarters equipped with two secondhand typesetting Monotype machines.

Column of Whimsy. In the Orient, competition among syndicates and news services has cut prices so low that Berrigan can afford to give his 3,500 readers the biggest names in the business: the Associated Press, United Press International and Reuters; Editorial Cartoonist Herblock; Columnists Art Buchwald, Sylvia Porter, Walter Lippmann and Joe Alsop; Pogo and Steve Canyon comics. Berrigan runs no editorials, explains: "We give the news and let intelligent readers form their own opinions."