Category Archives: Journalism

You can’t please everyone

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THE story is told of a young man and his father who set out one morning for the fair, in a bid to sell their donkey. Funds were low, the rains had not come for a long time, and they needed some way of putting food on the table for the next month or so.

When they set out, the old man rode on the donkey and his son walked alongside the beast. But they had gone just a few miles, when they came upon a number of women who stopped and stared, and then started to shout at them.

“How can you ride on the beast when you have a boy of such a tender age? You are forcing him to walk while you have a nice restful journey. Shame on you,” they yelled.

The old man was taken aback. Ashamed of himself, he quickly stopped the donkey, dismounted and then asked his son to get up on the beast. And they continued towards the market this way.

A few miles later, they encountered another group of peasants. This bunch too stopped and stared and then started to rant.

“Look at that overfed fellow. He rides on the donkey while his old, frail father is forced to walk. Have you no respect for age?” they shouted.

The old man wondered what to do. He was leading the donkey and so he stopped the animal, climbed on top himself and both father and son rode on the donkey.

But they had not made much progress before they came across a bunch of people leading their own donkeys in the opposite direction. One of this crowd went ballistic. “Have you ever seen such a shameful spectacle? Here are two grown human beings, well-fed, and in the prime of life, yet both have no consideration for that animal. How would you like it if I rode on your back?” this man asked.

The old man had nothing to counter this argument. He asked his son to dismount and did so himself as well. They both walked besides the donkey after that.

But the story is not over. Several miles down the road, they were again criticised for making a young donkey walk when it looked like the animal was about to collapse (or so the accuser said). “Carry that animal, you blighters,” he barked.

When they reached the fair, the old man and his son were carrying the donkey on their heads. They could not sell the beast because people thought they were both insane as they were carrying a beast of burden; there were also doubts that the donkey was on its last legs.

Lesson: You cannot please everyone. Make a reasoned decision and stick with it.

Thomas Friedman, fraud supreme

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WHAT does one call a writer who pretends that the life experiences of others are his own, and passes them off as such? A fraud? A poser? A plagiarist? I have not been able to find le mot juste.

Lest there is any mystery over whom one is referring to, I am talking about the diplomatic editor of the New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman.

Friedman has been ridiculed by journalists like Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, and rightly so, for his ridiculous use of language and his incoherent writings which appear in what is apparently the greatest newspaper in the US. (That tells us why newspapers are closing down rapidly in that country.)

I’ve always felt that Friedman is an average reporter but a nothing writer. He cannot think straight and comes up with the daftest analogies and ideas to try and convey some meaning about complex situations. He fails, miserably. Maybe, as Taibbi puts it so eloquently, his editors are drinking rubbing alcohol.

But this kind of intellectual dishonesty aside, I never suspected that Friedman was also making up the anecdotes that go into his reporting. That was until I read this great piece by the late Alexander Cockburn.

Cockburn writes of a time in 1984 when his younger brother, Patrick, was in Beirut as the Middle East correspondent for the Financial Times. Friedman was doing the same job, for the New York Times.

One day, the pair returned to the Commodore Hotel, the place where most foreign journalists were staying, after a bloody day in the field – Lebanon was in the midst of a civil war. Friedman went upstairs to write his copy, Patrick found his way to the bar and sat down with a glass of whisky.

A little while later, a Shia gunamn entered the bar and proceeded to smash all the bottles in the premises. He did not spot Patrick, who was, according to Alexander, left with two conclusions: one, that “journalists drinking Scotch were unlikely to be viewed with fondness by the fundamentalist gunman”, and secondly, “he was drinking the last Scotch likely to be consumed in the Commodore for quite a while”.

According to Alexander, when Friedman descended later, Patrick told him about the incident. A few days later, it duly figured in one of Friedman’s despatches. But by the time Friedman wrote his first book, From Beirut to Jerusalem, in 1989, the incident had morphed into something that happened to Friedman! I checked it – you can find Friedman’s deceit on page 225 of the book as published by Fontana Press. “My first glimpse of Beirut’s real bottom came at the Commodore Hotel bar on February 7, 1984… I was enjoying a ‘quiet’ lunch in the Commodore restaurant that day when…”

Alexander put it down to Friedman’s monumental conceit. He is probably right.

But this is also fraud, pure and simple. It follows in the great American tradition of stealing and then calling something your own.

Why journalists are treated with contempt

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NEWSPAPERS are dying.Circulations are dropping and owners are desperately trying to find new business models to keep their companies afloat.

One of the reasons that people in the US despise the written word is because of the amount of spin that is transmitted by journalists. And here is an excellent example of the kind of garbage that makes people ask whether journalists are in possession of their senses.

This is a case of a journalist swallowing spin from Google hook, line and sinker. Why does Google put ads in its search results and in Gmail? Simple. To make money.

The company gives a rat’s about who you are, what you like, or what you do. It wants to flash ads in front of people to make money.

Of course, your mail is scanned and, using word association, advertisements flash before your eyes. But there is one stupid assumption in this process – that humans are limited in their interests. There may be something that one is really interested in that one never mentions on Gmail.

That said, when Google spins about this process, pretending that it is doing people a great favour, a journalist should ignore it. Or else, rip it up and expose it for the spin that it is.

But no, this Los Angeles Times article swallows the whole explanation and takes it seriously. And the LA Times is said to be one of the better papers in the US of A.

Is it any wonder that people turn off papers in droves when journalists display the IQ of the common cockroach?