Human Rights in a Country With Too Many
Woke Taiwan Foreign Correspondents Club Elbows Stringers From Stage
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25 April 2024 (Thursday)
Human Rights in a Country With Too Many
Woke Taiwan Foreign Correspondents Club Elbows Stringers From Stage
By Wendell Minnick (Whiskey Mike) 顏文德
TAIPEI - With Covid and China’s crackdown on foreign journalists, including Hong Kong, the once sleepy island nation of Taiwan with maybe ten members of the TFCC’s monthly happy hour, found themselves overwhelmed with real competition.
Ten years ago, they almost closed the club for fear of no one showing up even for the annual Christmas Party.
Since the U.S. government shadow banned Taiwan in 1979 to recognize China, foreign journalists simply followed the money. Staff correspondents moved lock-stock-and-barrel from Taipei to Beijing.
Taiwan became a ghost town of freelancers and stringers. Staff correspondents in Beijing were so arrogant that they claimed Taiwan as part of their coverage and would fly in once a year to torment their local stringers to arrange interviews with senior political elites.
Bylines in big publications would have the staff correspondent’s name, “with” the stringer’s name at the bottom as a contributor. Stringers were often barred from the actual interview themselves. To make things worse, they often were forced to teach English part-time to make ends meet.
The foreign media’s coverage while in Beijing of China was always the same. The narrative was China was a rapidly growing economic and technological power that would eventually, with a little coxing from the Western media and pro-China apologists in the U.S. State Department, bend to international norms of trade and commerce. Eventually, embracing democracy and free speech.
But now, the narrative frame has changed. So why would an “objective” news organization stage a Human Rights Press Awards show in Taiwan? A country with virtually no human rights complaints beyond woke political parades with flag bearers waving the rainbow flag like deranged idiots.
Virtue signaling?
There certainly are no investigative journalism award shows at the TFCC. They are stenographers.
There might be an answer to this paradox.
A cultural anthropologist wrote a book on the insanity of the civil wars of Central America during the 1980s by focusing on foreign correspondents. These were conflicts of savagery, secret agents, scribes.
I read Mark Pedelty’s War Stories: The Culture of Foreign Correspondents (1995) so many times that the binding broke. There is nothing in the book that I have not witnessed amongst my peers in journalism.
It is all there - the arrogance, debauchery, infantilism, told with love as a testament to our human imperfections. No book better prepared me better for my career in journalism than Pedelty’s classic study.
I have no illusions about the discomforts posed via the dilemmas and paradoxes of reporting:
“Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse,” wrote Janet Malcolm in her 1990 book: The Journalist and the Murderer.
The first chapter of Malcolm’s book was a pivotal nail in the coffin confirming the psychopathology of journalism. A shock to the system that my chosen profession was mentally ill.
Malcolm continued to pull the mask off journalists who feign integrity and self-esteem:
“Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and ‘the public's right to know’; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.”
Malcolm shattered my thinking.
Is journalism psychopathy?
What happened to the Hegelian dialectic of Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis?
Journalists celebrate Hegel’s model to no end.
Would poetic Aporia be more honest, even though it would be an arrogant inversion, like the upside down crucifix of a horror movie.
What conclusion comes from that, whether Synthesis or not? After all, the most delusional trope in this business is “a good journalist asks the tough questions.”
Though twisted, Aporia does send a message.
Exempli gratia: Perhaps psychologist Carl Jung was wise in keeping a loaded pistol next to his bed? Everyone, including monsters, deserve a good night’s sleep.
To reduce my own fears and regrets I avoid politics. For I abide by the old folk wisdom of gnarly bar flies and ornery barmaids: "Grape or grain, but never the twain."
So Whiskey, only.
So are the new crop of “staff” and “tenured” foreign correspondents who have arrived on Taiwan shores going to really break stories or are they just going to give each other awards till Taiwan also falls to China’s axe?
Above: Minnick at North Korean front company in Taiwan: Korea International Chamber of Commerce. And by the way, how many North Korean’s have been butchered by the Kim regime? Or does it not matter that Taiwan does business with them?
To be honest, I would have rather walked into the KICC with a submachine gun and murdered them all than to have bothered writing a book that made no impact on Taiwan’s relationship with North Korea. You guessed it - they are still in business.
Perhaps Foreign Correspondents, including myself, are truly insane. We really believe we can make a difference? That our efforts should be awarded? And that we should all be waiting for that phone call from the Pulitzer Committee and the big book deal and lecture series?
Or is that world truly dead with the advent of podcasts and hate speech laws?