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Ironically, it is only after terminating my newsroom stint that I have grown so acutely aware that there is a world beyond my own nose, that there are issues more pertinent than issues like transport fare hikes and blogger defamation suits – and no, im not talking about uni apps.

www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050515/news_mz1e15howard.html
read this.

A Holocaust reprisal, on any scale, any level, in any country, under any circumstances, cannot be tolerated. How can responsible media fail to underscore this! Flip through ST and any mention of North Korea pertains to its nuclear capabilities and potential 8-party discussions on this issue.

Pardon my ignorance, but the horrific living conditions highlighted in that san diego union-tribune article – is that already common knowledge? Is it just me holed up in my comfort zone of air-conditioned cafes, low-fat lattes and wireless LAN connection? So everyone else knows of this already?

Prisoners are arbitrarily murdered by security guards. Women suffer from forced abortions at the hands of unlicensed doctors. Newborn babies are beaten to death. And sons and daughters are publicly executed in front of their mothers.
This is not the story of an age of slavery from centuries past or of a survivor of Nazi Germany’s Holocaust. It is what is happening at this moment inside the gulags of North Korea. The stories of gulag survivors are often too horrible to believe for the citizens of civilized countries. If one were to have the opportunity to speak with a survivor of a North Korean gulag, what they would reveal might be well beyond the threshold of the listener’s imagination.

Someone, anyone, please go help these people! I almost wish this journo was another Jayson Blair, concocting facts and fabricating real-life accounts, because no human being should have to go through what these North Korean captives are experiencing.

Prisoners are provided just enough food to be kept perpetually on the verge of starvation. They are compelled by their hunger to eat, if they can get away with it, the food of the labor-camp farm animals, as well as plants, grasses, bark, rats, snakes and anything remotely edible. In committing such desperate acts driven by acute hunger the prisoners simultaneously incur the extreme risk of being detected by an angry security guard and subjected to a brutal, on-the-spot execution.
Not surprisingly, the prisoners are quickly reduced to walking skeletons after their arrival. All gulag survivors said they were struck by the shortness, skinniness, premature aging, hunchbacks, and physical deformities of so many of the inmates they saw upon arriving at the gulag. These descriptions parallel those provided by survivors of the Holocaust in infamous camps like Auschwitz.

The mute photographs alone speak volumes, and the suffering they articulate is more than enough to make your heart bleed. Why. Why arent we trooping down to help these people! Why are we sitting here in our ivory towers! What is wrong with everyone! Sure, this reaction may sound immature, childish, but tell me, will any leader in his right mind be building the likes of ten atomic bombs, refusing nuclear treaties and enslaving his people this way?

How is this even different from the build-up to the second world war!

Tonight, pray that everyone of those sufferers know it in their hearts that there will come an end. That there will be light at the end of the tunnel, and that God is watching over them.

BY-LINE OR BY-LIE

Washington Post – “Jayson Blair, the New York Times reporter who resigned last week after plagiarizing a story about a woman whose son died in Iraq, never talked to two other soldiers’ parents he quoted in separate articles, the parents said in interviews this week.
The Rev. Tandy Sloan, an associate minister at a Cleveland church whose son was killed in Iraq, said he did not meet or speak to Blair, despite the fact that the reporter published his comments and described him at a church service.
“The article he wrote was totally erroneous,” Sloan said. “He hadn’t talked to me. He fabricated the whole story, is basically what he did.”


Chanced upon a single-line mention of this in today’s ST report about the Newsweek retraction of article. With every hour of my days now left to my discretion, scanning the papers from cover to cover is one luxury I can afford. And more than scanning, lo and behold, i actually READ. Something I never did, at least for the local dailies.

So anyway, this Washington Post report hardly shocked me. What shocks me is how the local dailies have yet to uncover any cases like this in our utopian state. Unethical journalism, i believe – and feel free to challenge me on this one -, is more of a preponderance than you would think.

Confesse it: Don’t you have doubts sometimes about fallacious articles based solely on “unnamed sources” or interviewees whose “names have been changed to protect their identity”?

Spend just a couple of months in the newsroom, and you would be utterly certain that the pressure to get the scoop, to report the breaking news, to upstage your fellow journos is so immense. You want the juicy bits, the scandalous quotes, the insider information that no one else would be able to report. And occasionally, you might just (just!) be tempted to conjour up the ever-convenient “unnamed source” to back up your angle, to give your story that extra oomph lacking in the other dailies.

It is really a little too convenient isn’t it? But what can be done. Sadly, if the confidentiality priviledge of hiding behind the term “unnamed source” is removed, and journos have to identify all sources not by pseudonym but by their real names, our dailies would probably be starved – emancipated. TNP might cease to exist, don’t you think.

What can be done. Perhaps, as this Washington Post article suggested, editors can afford to be more vigilant. Supposing the second draft of an article contains juicy bits that were suspiciously lacking in the first, they should logically suspect something amiss. Why leave out the meat if it’s right there on your plate! And another measure, albeit very far-fetched, could be a mandatory verfication of sources in the form of journos listing their sources’ contact numbers and personal information at the end of their articles, for the eyes of the management only – yes, not even the editors – so that supposing another Newsweek-like fiasco surfaces, the editors and management can publish an immediate reply authenticating the credibility of their journos.

“Frankly, no newspaper in the world is set up to monitor for cheats and fabricators,” says NYT editor Howell Raines. True, in an idyllic world that is. For every embezzeling banker, every lawyer with an expired license to practise, you have a lying journo. Between fact and fraud, i take fact. But if your fraud is too compelling and juicy, well, thats another story.

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It is only once in a very-long while that, during my trawls on cyberspace, i pick up something worth blogging about, other than my very grand and exciting life, narcissus i am.

Last night, surfed into the popular local blogs again, and was disturbed, immensely, by a particular incident causing a furore on the uh, “blogosphere” – quotation marks because newly-coined words irk me.

So background: a Today journalist writes an article about freedom of speech online, and interviews a couple of these famous local bloggers. She quotes them in the article, ONE line each, and subsequently, these bloggers accuse her of taking their quotes out of context. They seethe – Singapore media is one big propaganda machine! Where is journalistic integrity! Down with ST! They attack the poor journalist, and her editor, and moan about how they should have taped the interview down.

Get a grip, sheesh.

So alright, i grant you that journalists may not accord you the tone you wish to confer. Journalists may take your words out of context, but as long as they quote you word for word, is it really wrong for them to leave out the prior and following sentence, and feature solely the ONE line they picked up on? Were those not also your words?

The job of a journo is to report the truth, and also to sensationalise it, exaggerate it, give it multiple angles so the public is free to interpret it any way they so wish. (columnists are a different matter altogether, but hold your horses, later later.) So can you fault the journo for picking up the one sentence which binds her story together, especially if you had indeed uttered those exact words?

And blaming the editor is even more ludicrous. The said editor was not even present during the interview, and the job of the editor is not to go pounce on all their journos, asking them if their interviewees had said those exact words. Fine, if you are the president or prime minister, then journos have tapes and all to verify the exact quote. But hell, who do you think you are. The editor probably doesnt give two flying craps about these quotes. Especially if they are one-liners.

And should the editor give two flying craps about these quotes? I think not. The editor makes sure the article has a sensational angle, makes sure the article is grammatically correct, makes sure the big-shots dont get misquoted. And case closed, job down, lets go out for drinks.

So yes, while I empathize with the bloggers in question, afterall bloggers are all narcissistic pigs who love to see their words and names in print – whether online or in the news -, i think it is ridiculously unfair for them to blame the journo, the editor, and in association, the paper, the local media, the country. gee. and the pride they have while slamming these accusations, cmon, you would think the world was conspiring to misquote them on that one measly line.

and dare you still refute the ‘whiners and wimps’ comment.

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Give me all the knowledge in the world, charm me over. I want to spew inspired dissections, I want to revel you with the music from my fingers, I want to bowl you over with the genius of this poem, that novel.

Gee. Where did that come from.

It scares me, how little I know. How the world has conspired to deceive me, for 19 years now, that I was urm, some semblance of Smart. What utter rubbish. I do not care for nuts how you define wit, how you go out of your way to conceal painful truth in metaphors and euphemisms. You either have it or you don’t. So I know where I stand now, and will learn to deal with mediocrity and not being a snowflake >.thinking?! and those heels! omg, is that kumar again?

Watched Kingdom of Heaven on Friday, and Ridley Scott is cinematographic god. All hail this genius, honestly. This somehow gets me more than the whole Ocean’s Eleven kind of funky soundtrack, funky screenshots – it doesnt reek of a pretentious, trying-to-hard sort of feel that the Ocean’s Eleven guy – whats his name whats his name – Steven Sodenburgh (!) possesses.

And yesterday was surreal! Thank you for the play, the warhol :) Gee, my knowledge of Singapore history has stagnated since primary school. I know, history doesn’t change, but the lies you read in primary school are supposed to be uncovered by the time you are in secondary school. Then the pseudo truth you firmly believed in secondary school would be shaken once again in jc, people try to shock you, stun you, amaze you. And finally, you eiher reach a point where jadedness grips you – you simply do not care, bo chap – or you become a full-flung rebel.

There, there. No matter. All is not lost. Starbucks here I come now!

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I absolutely love Michael Buble’s Home – it’ll all be alright, I’ll be home tonight. I’m coming back home. It didn’t strike me, the lyrics, till that morning at the cafe. Tears were blinked away, and sipping my latte, I just needed that hug, that assurance – no matter how implausible – telling me you believed in me.

Yesterday was perhaps one of the most fucked-up days I’ve had for a while. It takes no landslide, no heart attack, no crash, but a simple, idle thought. I do not regret telling that lie – it was a white lie at worst. If I hadn’t signed my name there, it would be akin to giving this up. And I simply cannot bring myself to allow a silly mistake to trample on a future.

And with all these thoughts friggin clouding my head, I somehow allowed myself to lose another phone. My panasonic pimp phone. That phone which parents had bought for me after my proud proclamation that I hadnt lost the Sony Ericsson at ALL.

Cmon, cmon stay rational. breathe. in. out. breathe. you’ve gone through worse right, this aint that bad. its just a phone. no biggie. just go down to singtel now and claim that sim card now and go grab some lousy phone at a measely 10 per cent discount. go go go out now and quit letting these thoughts fuck you up.

I hope nothing gets in the way of our phuket trip. was just telling cheng how bothersome it is that even pre-departure, we’re already having problems. i hate having my friends, even my closest friends, see how i’m clutching at straws. i just hope everyone comes back from the trip satisfied, happy, contented. For myself, it probably wont be the shopping and spas, i know how jittery i will be feeling, so i just want to go with a peace of mind. and i want to come back with more than i leave with.

thank you for yesterday! it was literally the only highlight of my day, and for that split-second, i indulged in wondering what might have been. but that is a once upon a time, is it not? at least i can say, it was worth a shot. it’s funny how you never notice the charm in the most every-day things. the most common nuances of a person’s speech, the individualistic -whats that word whats that word – argh whats that word?! (it means quirky trait). blah. i hate it when a word eludes me.

meta-blogging at its best, i present to you.