How much is the truth worth?

I was not trained to be a journalist. I have hardly ever had to pound the pavement, sneak incriminating questions into interviews or go undercover for groundbreaking scoop.

I am a food writer. I write about food, the stories, people and culture behind that food, and maybe the odd 'newsy' story on organics or food prices, but I've never done anything as amazing as warzone reporting or as important as business or political commentary.

But the reporting the truth in media matters to me, just like, I think, it would matter to any other regular human being, or to modern society. Even if it's as trivial as whether the food at a particular restaurant was fresh, well-cooked and good value. (Perhaps that is too much to assume, in which case we are doomed and the world might as well end this year).

What is the point of reporting if it were not reported as seen?

The media model as we know it is rife with conflicts of interest. Between the financial reports on TV are advertisements of companies listed on the stock exchange, and between cartoons are junk food ads. You may have other examples, but the media business as it stands today seems the most incestuous of all industries. For a long time, media practitioners stood by ethical guidelines that meant that they would provide what is essentially the public service of reporting, and for the eyeballs interested in those reports, advertisers would pay. Note that they are just paying for the eyeballs, not the pens.

But times have changed. There are obvious things like advertorials, but they are usually ethically labelled "sponsored" or the like, but as media companies have grown, the importance of the business component of publications have too. And business involves financial transactions - both immediate and potential. It's the potential exchanges of money that is changing things. The networking, the ass-kissing, the handshaking. It's not like someone has paid you to advertise something now, but you'd better write about their businesses in a favourable light, else they won't come to you for advertising space.

Money is important in our world. I don't want to be all naive and flowerchild about it and say it's not. Even organisations originally set up do public good, such as reporting, have costs, and someone, somehow needs to cover them. Advertising has been our source since the day one, but like I said, the system is disgustingly flawed.


It's not helped by the fact that there is simply too great a supply of media in the world nowadays. Most blame the internet - stabbing bloggers is still the thing to do, seriously let's get over it - but to be honest, who invented this technology? Us, humans. Do writers Google things? Do they read blogs by "citizen journalists" or "amateurs"? You bet we do. So why are we blaming what we now rely on and take for granted? It's not going away any time soon, so we need to work out how to embrace this "new" world (that has been new for so long that it's now old to say it's new).

It's time to rethink the media model. Remember, proper reporting is a skill and a talent, just like being a carpenter or a chef - and there are differences in quality that correlate directly to the skills and talent of the person/people producing the media. But the question is, how much are people willing to pay for it? Only a fool would buy a newspaper if they could read an identical piece of news for free on the internet, but what if it was a much more informative report? Perhaps much better written? Or with a core promise to serve the reader and not the advertiser? 


How many of you are interested in "old fashioned", honest, unbiased, deep reporting, and how much are you willing to pay for it? 


If we continue down this path of ass-kissing reporting, in the end, it's the readers who lose. Never again will you have good, clean information. Never again will your stock purchase be the result of your analysis of good data, because data with integrity can no longer be reported to you.


I'm going to propose a radical idea. Pay for good reporting and ditch the sh*tty versions. In a capitalist society (thank goodness we still have one in Hong Kong), consumer demand dictates everything. If you keep reading dumb news, that's what you'll get. We all suffer from information overload nowadays, but how much of that is rubbish?

Publishers rely on your eyeballs for income. Sure, the paper price, or cable TV subscription, but your eyeballs also secure good advertising dollars, which funds good reporting. When you read rubbish instead of the good stuff, the good stuff loses eyeballs, readership lowers, advertisers pay less. The good stuff gets hidden behind paywalls because that's how publishers think they need to recoup revenue. And so you resort to reading more rubbish. Bad cycle.

My solutions:
1. Read/watch/listen only to quality media.
2. Treat media with the same respect you do art.

Point 2 might sound a bit scary, but like artists, writers and perhaps whole publications, need patrons. People who believe in the skills, talent and craft of the media makers and are willing to fund them just for that, in order to provide the world with all the news and commentary that is worthy and fit to print.

I don't think we need to live in an ideal world for that to happen, but then again, maybe I'm being idealistic.

Chinglish, The Broadway Musical - The Funny Truth

Chinglish

This is a long overdue post, as the play, Chinglish, has concluded its run, and I saw it back in November. It's still worth writing about, however, as there are so many things that people can learn from a production like this, and so much that is timeless. It was written ny David Henry Hwang and written by Leigh Silverman, and it's essentially a comedy about an American businessman's first China experience.

From the Chinglish Facebook Page

The great thing about this play is that it wasn't just entertaining, it brought out a lot of the finer details of Mainland Chinese culture (and issues arising from cultural differences) that outsiders simply would never even have guessed. The underhand dealings (that were in turn, underhanded) made for a great plot, and this was probably the most easily accepted/expected part of the story. There were other humorous scenes like when the male lead, Gary Wilmes, tries to say "I love you" in Mandarin and it comes out sounding completely wrong because of the tones etc. Predictable, but well done nonethless. Other parts, such as the ex-English teacher, posing as a business consultant, admitting his waning popularity and novelty to Chinese people, was very true, and probably a concept less familiar to most outside of China.

The one point that I can't get out of my head is how they totally nailed the traditional Chinese view of marriage. When Wilmes professes his love for Jennifer Lim, the female lead (pictured above in my crappy photo of the play's programme), and suggests they divorce their respective spouses to get married, Lim talks about qingyi 情義. She says that she doesn't love her husband, and actually scoffs at the idea, but she will never divorce him because of qingyi. This is a word that doesn't really have a direct English translation, perhaps because the idea doesn't exist culturally in the Anglo world (per the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). The closest I can think of is loyalty, but it's more like loyalty, along with love, which doesn't have to be romantic at all. It's funny because in Hong Kong triad movies they talk about this yi all the time. People brought up the Chinese "way" generally know this and put it in practice (hello nepotism - well, that's the bad part anyway) but we hardly ever talk about it. This qingyi is also seen between the English teacher and the mayor, who ends up being taken in by authorities on accusations of corruption.

To me, the way that it was presented makes it a sort of wake-up call. Even though its main impact on Americans (I suppose) was that they got an "inside" look into what China is really like (and the play did a very good job of that), I believe the play was a rather introspective experience for anyone brought up immersed in Chinese culture and with some first-hand experience of the Mainland. It was very exciting to see that the writer's observations, experience and analysis of China were so real and detailed (or perhaps just similar to my own?), and that he brought them to life, and to a wider audience, on stage. I've spoken to many an outsider who thinks that if they understand guanxi they know all about business in China; Chinglish would have been a great, harmless way to tell them "yeah, right".

Marriage, some connotations and realities in Hong Kong

In the past few weeks, there have been a few articles in The New York Times and The Atlantic that have floated into my Twitter feed about marriage. There is a nice round-up of links here in The Atlantic. They talk about how single motherhood is "the new normal", a preferred choice, how it might be an indication of class divide, and how men's roles are changing within the family (fathers heading up PTAs for example).

It seems strangely appropriate that I've come across these articles today as my dear cousin has just announced his engagement (I knew via Facebook before I was told by his parents, how 2012), and the past Chinese New Year, I've been asked about a hundred times when it's my "turn to give out red packets". (Traditionally, only married people give out red packets, the singletons - supposedly children - are always on the receiving end. Although, when you get to "a certain age" and are still single, you are gradually expected to give out red packets).

Hongkongers are dogs; and some observations on Mainland Chinese and Hong Kong media

All over my Facebook News Feed tonight is this video of someone repeatedly saying "Hongkongers are dogs" and "Hongkongers are bastards".

This guy is supposed to be a professor from Peking University. I guess each part of the world has their fair share of barking academics, but China is probably the only place where someone like this wouldn't get fired.

If he has half a brain he'd know that by stirring this stuff up he'd get himself seen, read etc. all over the interwebs - and guess what, we all fell for it. (Fuelling the "us and them" mentality - how creative). Maybe it was the channel's idea. The broadcaster that aired it is V1, which I'd never heard of. A quick check told me that they're a "new media" company - the conspiracy theoriest in me thinks they're just looking for a way to boost their ratings and visibility in the crowded internet news market.

Anyway, the bottom video, "reported" in that highly sensationalised manner typical of Hong Kong news (now that is something to talk sh*t about) shows a Hong Kong man shouting at a Mainland Chinese family for eating on the MTR. The shouting is indeed very rude, but you'll notice that about a third of the way through, the man explains to the MTR staff that he had tried telling them to stop eating before he went bezerk. Now, whether that's true is up to your interpretation - but it's funny that that never even came up in the arguments. If anyone has a longer video to share, it would be great to get a backstory.

I hope this isn't China's way of getting back at us because of that survey data that came out the other day about Hongkongers not identifying themselves as being "Chinese".

The Year of the Dragon will be the 15th year Hong Kong's been handed back to China. That's 35 years till we're no longer "one country two systems". Mounting fear, tensions, uncertainties are not surprising, but not exactly the best kinds of things to ring in the new year with, hey?