46 years ago, you say? June of 1972 and the press was 'concocting dramatic fantasies'? Even then?| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Old engagements |
| 2018-06-24 |
| [DavidWarrenOnline] I am in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, in June 1972. Well, really I am not, gentle reader. Rather I am glancing at a ragged old notebook, which I should have pitched decades ago. It has risen to the surface of a heap, a raft of dust and nostalgia. Forty-six years have gone by! Who scribbled all this pretentious nonsense? Me, I’m afraid. My best excuse is that I was not quite twenty. (I don’t suppose that will work any more.) A short plump man is pacing his office, his hands as if tied behind his back. He is Derek Davies, editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review ‐ a weekly I once held in veneration; a constellation of brave, capable journalists, of many nationalities; who had sometimes got the magazine banned, or themselves locked up, in the countries from where they were reporting; the best newsmagazine in Asia. (And now, quite extinct.) It was also a late relic of the colonial era, and of the Fabian aspirations descending from the London School of Economics. Oh, gentle reader, the men who held dominion over palm and pine were progressive to the core. We were discussing contemporary journalism. Rather, Mr Davies was discussing this, as he paced; I was listening politely. "I have grown very tired of journalisme engagé," he asserted. He was agreeing with something I had not quite said, about the tone and posturing I had witnessed among journalists in Vietnam, on a mission that had little to do with reporting. These were hacks indifferent to the truth, incurious about their sources, vain, self-serving, committed only to good salaries, and scoring political points. Though I was very young, I was already jaded from the experience of watching them concoct dramatic fantasies, in the hope these would pass for front page news, and win them Pulitzers. Yet few were as bad as their editors, back home, who added the finishing touches. I made an exception for the photographers, who risked their skins in the field. Often they were surprisingly rightwing. This was because they’d had the opportunity to stare Communism in the face, and understood what the Americans were fighting. Whereas the writers, romanticizing the Viet Cong, strayed seldom from the comforts of Saigon. Mr Davies knew all this. He told me several ear-curling stories, without mentioning his own correspondents. But he was not so brave to risk defying the bigger names, the self-made legends ‐ a gallery of well-connected leftists now long since forgotten. The limit of his ambition was to check their facts, when they were most egregiously mistaken. This was something, however, and it made the "FEER" a much more informative read than, say, Time magazine, or Newsweek ‐ as much "fake news" then as today, though in those days a little more sophisticated. Not journalism, but only journalisme engagé; Mr Davies feared this would be the future. For a moment he was dark, for what he described was a spirit of malice; an overwhelmingly destructive attitude of mind; and deriving from that, a terrible blindness. The engaged journalist can no longer see what is right before his eyes. He makes no concession to realities. He cannot attribute ‐ to his "Johnson" or his "Nixon" or his "Trump" ‐ any particle of honest intention. He focuses instead a compulsive hatred, with no self-deprecating relief. In his imagination he beholds a pure monster. He becomes what he beholds. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #1 46 years ago, you say? June of 1972 and the press was 'concocting dramatic fantasies'? Even then? |
| Posted by: Bobby 2018-06-24 13:45 |