Beijing: Journalism
Lately I am very interested in the basics behind journalism. One of my dearest friends just left for a correspondent job in Seoul, South Korea. He is fully prepared, knows what he wants, but it will not be easy to gather news in a country which is not your own. Because I am writing a small book on my own travelling and touring, I have read Joris Luyendijks People Like Us, in which the writer deals with the pro’s and con’s of being a journalist in Israel and the Middle East.
‘As he recounts, Luyendijk came to understand that covering an Arab country while saying little about ordinary life under dictatorship was like covering the Netherlands in 1943 while saying little about the Nazi occupation. Dictatorship was the story. The western media depicted the Arab world as a chessboard, but it was more like a poorhouse run by corrupt thugs.’
This morning I met a journalist of one of my favorite newspapers, the Wall Street Journal, while having breakfast in my hotel. He told me that everything in China is not what it seems. It’s a dictatorship and besides having to worry about several sites on the internet being blocked and checked (maybe they are even reading this blogpost), 60% of the normal newspapers are filled with propaganda. Like my booker here said: “We don’t read what is in the newspapers, we read what is between the lines.”
Hmmm.. Zie ook http://elpincheholandes.nl/2010/06/correspondenten-en-blogs-ii/