A Veteran Journalist's View of Today's World

Written by John McBeth

Description: ImageAnd it isn't encouraging

This is an excerpt from Reporter: Forty Years Covering Asia (Talisman
Publishers, hardback, 384 pp., S$42) by John McBeth, who among other things
spent a quarter-century as the longest-serving correspondent for the
now-defunct Far Eastern Economic Review. McBeth looks with trepidation at
how standards have fallen in today's world of journalism. The book is
available in local bookshops.

...While this book may necessarily be a memoir, I would like to think it is
more a reflection of the lives of a generation of journalists who came to
Asia on a wing and a prayer - and in my case by ship - and stayed on as
fascinated witnesses to a region going through historic political and
economic change. We all have a story to tell. We have also had a lot of
great times that will never be repeated.

Most foreign journalists who come to Asia today already work for the wire
services or established publications, even if some are a shadow of what they
once were. They are often married, sometimes with kids. They have houses,
cars, offices and assistants as part of the package. They are here today and
gone tomorrow, ticking off another box on their rise up the promotional
ladder.

It is that which sets them apart from those of us who have lived the story
and made Asia our home. In many cases, it happened more by accident than
design. The quarter century I spent on the Far Eastern Economic Review,
longer than any other correspondent, only reinforced that process because of
the opportunities it presented to plumb the depths of each and every story.

For the generations of people who read the Review, its slow lingering death
at the hands of corporate America has left a gaping hole in English coverage
of the region that has never been filled. Still, it is better to look back
more with pleasure than in pain. As one of my colleagues wrote to me not
long ago: "We should celebrate the correct choices and kind hand of fate
that have permitted us to enjoy the pleasures and witness the perils of life
in Asia."

I am not a war correspondent and I have not had the experiences of many of
my more illustrious peers, who covered Vietnam and other conflicts around
the world. On more than one occasion during the writing of this book I asked
myself why I was doing it, given the comparatively uneventful life I have
led. But what kept me going was the knowledge that journalism is not just
about wars and, if nothing else, I am one of a `dying breed in Asia and in
journalism in general. The job will never be the same. It can't be. That's
how much the news business and print journalism in particular has changed
and continues to change. In my opinion for the worse.

There was a time, certainly in Vietnam in the 1960s and in Bangkok in the
1970s and early 1980s, when the press corps was a unique institution, where
lifelong friendships were forged and what we did was both interesting and
full of enterprise and adventure. These days, that same camaraderie only
reveals itself when one of us dies and all the old stories are retold,
always amusing and always studiously irreverent. In this new age of budget
cuts, clean living, correct language and laptops much of that has simply
disappeared in the space of two decades.

When young people today tell me that they want to be print journalists, I
feel almost pity. Reading the printed word these days comes a poor second to
television and the internet, newspapers and magazines are dying all around
us, and no one seems to have worked out a formula for commercial success on
the web. For some reason, the so-called content providers are always at the
bottom of the heap, yet if they are doing their jobs and are considered to
be well informed, everyone wants to hear their opinions. Surely that is
worth more than the almost laughable word rates they offer these days.

In a 2009 interview, former London Sunday Times editor Harold Evans decried
the way pressmen are being turned into paupers. "It's not the delivery
vehicle that matters," he said. "What matters is the journalism."

Very true. Objectivity and balance, the two factors I feel are more
important than anything in my trade, have undergone a serious deterioration
in recent years. Too many news stories are opinionated or carry an obvious
bias. Adding to that are what I call the 'cross-dresser', the print
journalists who appear as guests on televised talkathons where they put
their political prejudices on show. Television has been our main enemy.
Brought up reading and listening to the radio, even I am still fascinated
how we can see things happening on the other side of the world in real time.


But most of the cable news networks have forsaken objectivity entirely and
seem to favor entertainment over real news, ideology over reality. Most
Internet sites are only interested in comment, unencumbered by rules about
verification and sourcing. Bloggers, who give new meaning to the expression
'talk is cheap,' would have nothing to talk about if it was not for the
costly enterprise of news-gathering and investigative reporting.

In the years to come, financial markets are going to be reacting more and
more to rumour with all the implications that entails. It has been difficult
to put the last four decades in any sort of chronological order, so chapters
that begin in the 1970s and 1980s may ramble on into the following two
decades. Mostly, this book is about the amazing characters I have met along
the way, good and bad, but never indifferent.

Unknowingly in many cases, these same people guided my choice of the best
stories I have covered in Asia, stories which form the backbone of what is
only a stop-start narrative. You will never have heard of some of them or,
better still, will not be able to look them up on Google. The internet
should never take precedence over a warm body in gathering information. But,
used wisely, it is a remarkable search tool which has also allowed me to
stay in touch with people I came to rely on as sources and whose friendships
and knowledge I still value more than anything else with the exception, of
course, of my wife and soulmate,