Public Address - Yellow Peril (Home)

Southern Comfort | Jun 26, 2007 03:23

Reading about Russell's case of the good ol' Singaporean Heebie-Jeebies made me realise just why I've been enjoyed Hong Kong so much: it's like Singapore but without the annoying bits.

I've just been transiting a couple of days in Hong Kong, and it took me a while to figure out why I was finding it so... homey. Although I've leveled a fair amount of vitriol at the Singaporean-industrial complex, it is ultimately the place where most of my family is concentrated, and the country that I spent the second-most amount of time in as a child, after New Zealand. And so I do have fond memories of the place, as well as the... well... odd untamable heebie-jeebie.

Like Singapore, Hong Kong has a muggy, mumsy humidity, and you are smothered by Cantonese comfort food everywhere you turn. You quickly sink into deep obsessions over models of cellphones, cameras and laptops due to pure environmental immersion. They subway is wildly efficient, so much so that the integrated transport card got bored of just facilitating your transport and decided to start paying for your movies, 7-11 snacks and phone calls too. Everyone looks and dresses like one of my Singaporean or Malaysian relatives, in the way that people don't in Northern China. Even Keith's mum reminded me of a cross between my mum and Pansy Wong. I'm not sure whether this is an explanation of why I liked Keith's mum, or why Keith likes Pansy Wong.

Yes, Singapore offers all these comfy attractions - but it has an inescapably weird feeling about it, if you're a political person. Even with the Chinese Communist Party casting its ten-year shadow over Hong Kong, the Singaporean heebie-jeebies are markedly missing from Secret Pirate Island.

Ten years after the handover, and Hong Kong is still a place where you can wander through the pedestrian mall streets and amid the product demonstrations, happen upon civil society demonstrations too. This week on Sai Yeung Choi South St, aside from the perennial Falungong street-performers (next: organ juggling!), was a campaign against a potential regulatory threat to the status of the de facto public broadcaster Radio Television Hong Kong, within the broader issue of protecting press standards and free speech. According to the masking tape label on their PA, their system either belonged to the NGO 'Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor', or it was a mislabeled bit of events equipment. Here and there down the main shopping drags, median barrier-advertising announces events for various political NGOs and Human Rights groups, nestled between all that stuff that makes your skin really white.

While getting lost in a mall with Keith, we happened upon a photojournalism exhibit commemorating ten years of the return to China, complete with records of the regular mass demonstrations to commemorate the Tiananmen Square incident, the huge 2002 turnout against the potential curtailing of civil rights, and the WTO demonstrations of 2005. Just across the street from the Peninsula Plaza, where I blundered into Tiffany's, Prada, Versace, and Manolo Blahnik in my Kumfs, dude, was a photojournalism exhibition at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre on the lives of the homeless street-sleepers who bed down every night outside the, um, Hong Kong Cultural Centre.

I'm now officially counting Hong Kong as Southeast Asia, just so I can say that it's my favourite Southeast Asian city so far.

Actually, Keith seems to despair of the Hong Kong media, which is apparently as obsessed with food-safety as the New Zealand media is obsessed with the weather. Maybe he has a point - I don't live in Hong Kong. But Keith sure doesn't live in Singapore. It's pretty clear that even though Hong Kong doesn't have universal suffrage, that its population and media enjoy a deeper level of political freedom, or perhaps, political motivation to maintain and deepen their civil society.

Singapore has changed in recent years, and I haven't been there for quite a while (once a place gives you the heebie jeebies you don't tend to run back), but at some point I'd like to pop back in and see how things have come along. If you're in Auckland for the upcoming Banana conference, you'll probably get a better idea than I can, when Mr Brown dishes the dirt (not our one, the Other one).

But I'm missing the Banana conference for the first time ever, and revisiting the irritating-aunty-land, as opposed to the Motherland, is a distant prospect right now, as I'm sitting in Hong Kong airport, enjoying the free wifi, about to leave the Eastern hemisphere completely.

I may be some time.

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Asian Angst: is it time to send some payback? | Jun 11, 2007 12:48

NZ Press Council, 11 June 2007:

"The Press Council has upheld complaints by Tze Ming Mok and others, the Asia New Zealand Foundation and Grant Hannis against North & South for its report on Asian immigration and crime. The Council has found the magazine breached its principles on accuracy and discrimination."

It was a unanimous ruling and - despite the current unlawfulness of such behaviour - "an unmitigated spanking", as one observer put it.

I have archived all the documents relating to the three complaints against 'Asian Angst' and North & South here, including the full ruling, Deborah Coddington's official responses to the complainants, a timeline, some background explanation, the article's text, and all the statistics one could possibly desire. Choice excerpts from the conclusion are below (additional emphasis mine).

Magazines are entitled to take a strong position on issues they address (principle 7). But that does not legitimise gratuitous emphasis on dehumanising racial stereotypes and fear-mongering and, of course, the need for accuracy always remains. The key issue is the absence of correlation between the Asian population and the crime rate. Ms Coddington argues she has recorded the rise in the Asian population and it would have insulted the readers to link that with the crime figures. The Council does not accept this argument. The linkage is vital and should have been made explicit. It is abundantly clear and is not effectively challenged by Ms Coddington, despite quibbles about terminology and direct comparisons of her figures with those of her critics, that the rate of offending is dropping pro rata. To then talk of a gathering crime tide is therefore wrong.

[...]

The language used is emotionally loaded. There is an explicit statement in the third paragraph of the article "we'll make it loud and clear from the start, the vast majority of Asians making New Zealand their new home are hard-working, focused on getting their children well educated and ensuring they're not dependent on the state (unlike so many New Zealand citizens.)". But the subsequent use of phrases like "The Asian menace has been steadily creeping up on us", "Asian crime continues to greet us with monotonous regularity" and "as each week passes with news of yet another arrest involving a Chinese sounding name" combine to portray a group that has a disproportionate tendency to crime.

[...] That there are serious crimes committed by individual Asians is not at issue but the failure to set this in context, both of other sectors of New Zealand society and of the Asian communities as a whole, cannot but stigmatise a whole group.

There are counter-references in the report. [...] But th[ese are] followed by a reference to ignorance of "a major problem" and the quotations do not therefore change the overall tenor of the material which in the Council's view does breach the Principle referring to discrimination.

An example of the new epithets now officially available for use: 'Officially discredited award-winning journalist Deborah Coddington, said of her officially discredited and racist article 'Asian Angst', after reading the Press Council ruling "I can only conclude that I was correct all along."

We have our victory; what are the lessons? Here are a few I can think of, shared in the spirit of learning, jurisprudential interest, and constructiveness, rather than of gloating (okay, *as well as* gloating) - and these were interesting findings for everyone in the media game, including me.

Lesson 1: For journalists

It's not a dogwhistle when every damn person on the street can hear it.

Officially ruling on whether an article is discriminatory is a tricky and often very subjective business. That's why this article should probably should be used in journalism training as an example of how not to get away with it.

Importantly, this ruling draws a line in the sand about 'balance'. If your story has an overriding mission to portray an ethnic group as negatively as the officially discredited, officially racist article did, even if you try to round out the edges with one or two counterquotes from bemused officials the intent will still be clear. You can't have it both ways.

They tried hard though. In her correspondence, Coddington gave us valuable insights into the magazine's convoluted attempt to have their cake and feed racism with it too, hitting the heights of semantic contortion with hilarious results. With regard to the "gathering crime tide" that didn't exist, at page 3 of her response to our complaint, she states: "The metaphor was carefully chosen." And this is the killer:

A "gathering crime tide" is not a synonym for a "crime wave', as Mabbett and Mok seem to think... A tide goes in and out..." (my emphasis)

Let's pause there, to appreciate the glories of that distinction. You couldn't make this shit up (even though this shit is about making shit up). You can see Coddington and Robyn Langwell examining the cake. How? How can we make sure that the racists eat the cake? But that no-one can prove that we fed it to them? The Press Council was good enough to call this rationalisation "disingenuous".

Lesson 2: For publishers and editors

Letters ain't enough unless they spell 'S-O-R-R-Y'

When your journalist has done their utmost to misinform under your editorial watch, not even printing dozens of critical letters over three months will save you if you don't take editorial responsibility for your actions.

The racist icing that Langwell laid on the racist cake (or for our side, the insult atop the injury), was that despite printing negative feedback about the article in following issues, the response from the magazine itself only perpetuated the misinformation over statistics. An admission or a correction printed in the magazine may have helped them feebly fend off a complaint. But they tanked, publishing Coddington's obfuscatory right of reply in the January issue, and printing an editorial defense, not an apology. No-one took responsibility for the fudged 'crime tide'. The Press Council didn't buy it.

Lesson 3: For the magazine industry

Desperate measures imply desperate times

Worried by sinking magazine sales and circulation due to market saturation and the explosion of web media? Think that tapping into the so-called "anguish" of the excessively invoked 'middle-New Zealand' by scaremongering about some minority group is the answer? Think again. Not only is it insulting to those who you consider the mainstay of your "Thinking New Zealand" readership, it also makes you look desperate.

I heard Coddington say plaintively on NatRad during a grilling over the article, "it wasn't even my idea!" (NB: I, uh, 'stand by' my quoting of her comments on the radio, although if you are reading any of her responses to the complainants, her use of quotation marks around what she thinks people have said about her on the radio should definitely be taken figuratively rather than literally) I have some sympathy for Coddington's 'Robyn made me do it' defense. The idea and the direction of the article very much seemed to be an editorially driven attempt at strategic positioning - one that backfired. Even if there was a spike in sales for that issue (perhaps to fuel mass burnings), was it worth it to position one's magazine so clearly on the side of the grumpy racist codger market, which is only going to die off in the future? Even invoking the "anguish" of middle-New Zealand about house-prices, keeping cheerful, and maintaining one's brain function on successive Listener covers comes off as insightfully fashion-forward by comparison.

Also, the more you try to tap into generalised bigoted "anguish", the more likely your journalists are to screw up on the facts as they are warped to suit the editorial purpose. And the watchdogs are watching - even 'crazed bloggers' are able to make Press Council complaints. Is getting raked over the coals by the rest of the industry ever good for a magazine?

Lesson 4: For anyone going before the Press Council

The Press Council is not a talkback radio audience

You can mostly get away with intellectual bankruptcy in an op-ed column; hey it may even be compulsory. But if you think you can take the same tactics to a credible, adjudicatory industry body and think you're going to win... well, prepare for a reality check.

Coddington defended the article to the Press Council using methods familiar to anyone who's read her op-eds or witnessed her defend herself anywhere in the media:
a) make ad hominem attacks
b) accuse your critics of having made ad hominem attacks
c) accuse your critics of having secret agendas
d) dismiss your critics because they have criticised you before
e) dismiss any substantive points with either mischaracterisation of the argument, obfuscation of the facts, misquotes, or bait-and-switch non sequiturs.

It might fly in the Herald on Sunday (her embargo-breaking pre-emptive strike yesterday for example, ran the full gamut), but the Press Council weren't having any of it.

Ultimately, Coddington didn't - and couldn't - fight us on the facts. During the process, she dismissed the group complaint and Asia:NZ's criticism of her statistics, saying (just as she had in the letters page of both the Listener and North and South) that we weren't comparing "like with like." This was despite our specific use of the same statistics to do exactly that. Grant Hannis' later complaint kept on at her over the statistics - she again tried to say he wasn't comparing "like with like" (uh, he was using exactly the same table-builder as she was on the StatsNZ site), but because he didn't have any distracting qualities that she could attack (being Asian, being part of a conspiracy, etc) she eventually ran out of insults and bait-and-switch options. And so, the great victory of the Hannis complaint was that it forced her to say one thing that was actually on topic in defense of her use of statistics - that referring directly to the actual, real Asian crime rate by including the population increase in her calculation would "insult the intelligence of my readers..."

It was rather more likely that the Press Council were the ones who were feeling insulted by her off-point submissions - they rejected her criticism of Asia:NZ's right to complain, and totally ignored her very odd and conspiratorial comments about the group complaint. But her submissions made fascinating reading, and by fascinating, I mean sort of mad. See? Entertainment has its place. I have it on good authority that she was royally bummed when she heard the Press Council result, because of all the effort she had put into her submissions - I hope it will give her some satisfaction to know that some value is being derived from her work.

For the benefit of all you co-conspirators reading Public Address, at page 6 of her response she said of the group complaint:

The principal author, Russell Brown* has been personally criticising my[sic] since 1996, when I published a book listing paedophiles and sex offenders (referring to me on radio as the most bizarre woman in Auckland, or something).** I note he now calls me "Coddingtonswallop" on his website.*** I therefore do not give his criticism any credibility.

It is also important to note that Russell Brown's website "Hard News",**** publishes regular contributions from Keith Ng and Tze Ming Mok. It is therefore very easy to come to the conclusion that the personal vilification meted out to me by all those writers on this website is the same spirit behind the official complaint to the Press Council.*****

[...]

Clearly there is no conspiracy here, but I believe the authors of these letters and complaints to the Press Council have multiplied their efforts in an attempt to bulk up what, in essence, is just one complaint."*****

*did not author the complaint, and not a party to the complaint
**probably means he never said this
***he never called her this
****not the name of the website
*****Fails to notice that Keith and I also are both Chinese, or even, "Asian", which may have been another motivating "spirit behind the official complaint to the Press Council."
***** ie there is a conspiracy. Or maybe she just managed to annoy a *lot* of people

Coddington referred to Russell as the "principal author" of the original complaint letter to North & South, and noted a suspicious similarity between that letter (which the group considered our warning shot) and the formal complaint to the Press Council (duh). Ultimately, both versions were mostly my work, on top of a reworking of Keith's initial analysis, and with helpful input, support, admin/logistics, and quality screening from several dozen other concerned members of mostly Asian communities. Russell signed on to the 'warning shot' letter, along with a couple of other Pakeha and Maori supporters, and I think he would be horrified to be blamed for drawing up tables that look as ugly as this (as would Keith). Russell actually excused himself from the Press Council complaint when it came time to haul out the big guns, as he thought it might be weird for journalists to be taking each other to the Press Council.

After we sent our comments to the Press Council to clarify authorship, Coddington's response was:

"My only comment is on Ms Mok's allegation that I made "peculiar assumptions as to authorship, imputing that the complaints were instigated by the journalist Russell Brown (not a party to the complaint)." I never imputed Brown "instigated" the complaint, as is clear in my original submission. I merely addressed the fact that Russell Brown, I believe, is motivated to complain about me by less than professional reasons."

So, she "never imputed Brown "instigated" the complaint"; just that he personally authored it... And there was no conspiracy, except for the conspiracy.

The complainants couldn't have hoped for an opponent whose submissions were more destructive to her own credibility than Coddington. In fact, the Council's disdain for her responses seemed so palpable, that I almost get the sense that all our pages and pages of detailed textual and statistical analyses were barely necessary.

Lesson 5: For everyone

Wu-Tang Clan ain't nuttin' ta fuck wit'

I've dished all this inside procedural dirt above, not only out of the pleasures of gloating, but because I actually have a point: it seems that Deborah Coddington simply could not acknowledge that Asian people would or could ever effectively take her on (let alone win), on their own steam, with support from genuine allies, as a united and diverse group, and motivated by their real interests as members of ethnic communities who could be harmed by her article.

Perhaps she was so keenly aware of her non-Asian critics that she saw invisible vindictive hands everywhere? Perhaps she thought that our English wouldn't be good enough to write the complaint? Or maybe when referring to the original group letter of indignation to North & South as 'Russell Brown et al" she was going alphabetical out of convenience, but was having difficulty spelling 'Sekhar Bandyopadhyay et al'?

While she was incredibly rude in her response to Grant Hannis' complaint, Coddington's attitude to the Asian complainants were oddly patronising. She suggested repeatedly that Charles (Fei Loong) Mabbett of the Asia:NZ Foundation didn't have the moral authority to make a complaint. She also seemed to think that because the Embedded Asian Underground showed some ability to coordinate joint actions and work the media, that our complaints were invalid. Presumably, the reason a whole bunch of Asians were out for blood, had coherent arguments, and were getting media coverage, was not because she had written a crappy article that pissed us off and insulted everyone's intelligence, but because some mean, powerful media people had it in for her.

To be fair (very briefly), I have no doubt that there are a lot of journalists who will take pleasure in this ruling, and that cannot be a pleasant experience for Coddington, as this is her profession and her peer group. The fact that many journalists don't seem to like her much, certainly played a part in how *easy* it was to generate a goodly amount of press reaction to the article. But clearly, the reason some journalists are happy to knife her, is because of articles like this. Not for no reason. The fact that Charles Mabbett, Keith and I, all had our own non-conspiratorial connections in the mainstream press that we were perfectly entitled to make use of, wasn't because we were part of a pre-existing anti-Coddington coalition, but because we wrote our way into the business, on our own merits, as part of the slow but inevitable increase in Chinese people in the media.

The Embedded Asian Underground has done itself proud, so allow me a further moment of smugness to say, props to us. Still, we didn't win this in a vacuum. It's damn good to see how the landscape has changed since 1993 and the 'Inv-Asian' article. When 'Asian Angst' was published last year, there was a widespread sense of disbelief that something like this was actually happening again - it seemed so anachronistic, a kind of journalism from another era, repudiated long ago. The strength and success of the response has showed that we were right to think that our political culture had already moved on from the these overt, aggressive displays of media xenophobia - and many, many thanks are due to everyone who has helped prove us right. That probably includes you.

Finally: for Deborah Coddington:

Zen is not to be feared

In a strange echo of Keith finding out that former Labour Party candidate Stephen Ching literally did not know the meaning of the word 'tokenism', we also discovered during the complaints process that Coddington cannot spell 'xenophobia'.

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Spoon Forth | Jun 04, 2007 21:24

The Great Firewall decided to temporarily block blogspot, and my personal site last week. The usual random pattern, I thought - but a few days later, today, it's the anniversary that dare not speak its name (rhymes with Loon North). Ah. Still, today when you Google 'Tiananmen' from Beijing, you get a page of Wikipedia and BBC listings describing the incident (links blocked though), and if you image-google, you get columns of Tanks, Tank Man, and a pile of dead people.

This has been done before on this very site, but what better day to have another go at it. When you use Chinese google, and misstype '六死事件' it handily asks in Chinese, 'do you mean the June 4th incident?' The first-page results are mostly Chinese news reports relating to how the 'incident' has affected foreign relations, and even one on the previously proscribed commemoration of Hu Yaobang's birthday, whose death marked the beginning of the demonstrations. When you image-Google 'June 4th incident' you get one relevant picture on the page - a demonstration scene; when you image-Google 'Tiananmen incident' (and remember, Googling 'Tiananmen' in China is like Googling 'Aotea Square' in New Zealand', so getting that comical contrast between tanks and tourists on the two Googles doesn't mean much), you get two relevant pictures on the page: The same demo scene (with the Goddess of Democracy) and the iconic picture of Zhao Ziyang speaking through a megaphone to the students, with current Premier Wen Jiabao at his shoulder - from the Wikipedia page. I wrote about that picture last year with a little more contextual clarity than I'm doing now.

To further commemorate this invisible pebble of a day that causes such unpredictable ripples though the Chinese internet, here's an interview I did in Shanghai with Isaac Mao, Chinese cyberactivist. Because it was in a noisy Chinese restaurant (where else?) and recorded on a dubious knock-off MP3 player, it wasn't swish enough to make PA radio, but here you go, finally.

Founder of China's first online forum discussing blogging technology in 2002, Isaac Mao is now one of China's best known bloggers. In 2002, Mao numbered blogs in perhaps the thousands in China; at last count, China had over 17 million regular bloggers, 34 million blogs in all, and a blog readership deep into the hundreds of millions. So it's perhaps the opposite of hyperbole to say that Mao is the Russell Brown of China, but like Russ, Isaac is not just a blogger, but an originator, a coordinator, and a proselytiser.

At the end of March this year, the Chinese public was galvanised by a private Chongqing household's holdout against a mall development, a story which all media except a liveblogger called Zola was eventually prevented from covering; and I talked with Mao in Shanghai about Chinese blogging's impact on the media, freedom of speech, his plans for this year's annual Chinese bloggers conference which he organises, and his usual covert operations behind the Great Firewall of China.

IM: [Regarding the GFW] It's a problem, but we should regard it as a common problem around the world; China is very typical, in the tradition of China from a traditional perspective, the government, the politicians, just want to control people's thinking, they want one voice… But things are changing in its own way, no-one can prevent these things happening.

Internet is a boundless world and anyone can create a blog within minutes… if the government can control the local media or local website, they cannot control the websites around the world… it's too late.

TM: We call it 'Whack-a-mole', it's a game where you have a table with holes in it, and these heads poke up out the holes and you have to whack them down again.

IM: Yes, and they try to use human labour to do it… manual searching to try to locate the position of the hosting, and command the ISP to shut down the website… that's why I moved my website to overseas hosting… they unplugged my website, but now I am on an overseas server… You cannot use only 10,000 net police to prevent 1 billion people to do so many things. We try to develop some technology to help Chinese people to access the whole world with proxy, some new tools like Tor which does anonymous accessing, and help people to set up their own blogs on overseas hosting, or group blogs on secret hosting websites. If I write something there must be someone else will quote my voice, and someone else will quote his voice too, and it connects each other, becomes flat media, not like today's hierarchical media, vertical media, and in China I don't think anything can be closed today, …the government can't stop it from happening.

TM: how has this affected the mainstream media?

IM: I think they are trying to adapt to the new media technologies and trying to not be left behind... The traditional media are trying to get more content from the blogosphere because we don't think they have enough resource to do it, so they try to copy content from the blogosphere to make their content more interesting. When you switch on your TV set many channels broadcast the same content, it's very boring for the Chinese people. It's a kind of change, even CCTV in Beijing, they are trying to use the internet… but actually they don't know how to really adapt to the change, they just copy the content.

TM: how has the climate been post Jiang Zemin, under the Hu Jintao government?

IM: I think it is kind of tighter control after Mr Hu took over… however they all realise that they cannot prevent things happening, actually they are trying to hear what people are saying on the internet, they are trying to listen to people too. They know something is happening and they cannot just rely on their traditional, maybe hierarchical system to get the right information, in fact they are in siege at their central office, they cannot get the right information… but they also fear losing control to the whole country… I think they have their own strategy, they tighten something, loosen something…

I think it can do something if they try to rebuild their own system, but their system is a closed system, they try to operate the game by themselves instead of trying to get people in. They just try to get some information from the people's voice space, but they don't want to respect the space.

TM: are there many active bloggers in ethnic minority areas?

IM: yeah, yeah, in the blogosphere, of those that are different from the traditional business or other things, I think there are 20-30% of people from those areas, the western provinces… I think blogging is a tool to help them speak out. In China it's so obvious that people are seeking new tools to express themselves, even under repression. To other countries… maybe in NZ people already have many forms of tools to speak out and maybe blogging is only one new form… but for developing countries blogging is more important to enable social equality.

We just created a new project called Me Media and it has collected about 100 bloggers around the country to coedit a weekly journal to discuss what happened last week in the Chinese blogosphere, including the case in Chongqing last week… the official media cannot talk about it anymore, but Me Media can talk about it. We also have technical support frm the local communities, they are all geeks… and they can support our project from being blocked. So even if the government blocks one site, we can have another mirror site to recover.

Mao talked about his preparations for this year's blogcon, and the results he was hoping for:

IM: [We want t]o make it more diversified, to invite different kinds of bloggers, even from some marginal areas, including maybe gay bloggers, some political bloggers, even some dissident bloggers. We try to have some international speakers every year, for example last year we had Rebecca McKinnon from the Harvard Berkman centre, the first year we had Eric Eldred from Creative Commons… We also like to invite more people from other countries to make Chinese bloggers feel more open and connected… to share more information. We have some bridge bloggers, they try to blog in a bilingual way. Sometimes some of them only blog in English… to tell the outside world what is really happening in China, a different voice from the official media. [But] we got warnings from the authorities that we cannot invite people from liusi shijian [Spoon Forth Incident], the Tiananmen event, and some dissident bloggers… otherwise they will totally close it down.

A foreign diplomat present noted, diplomatically, that things were improving, and that the government seemed to be allowing them some room to move, or even "enough space"

IM: [laughs] It's something. It's good, it is changing. Still, we try to explore the bigger borders, the bigger space.

Me Media updates are regularly available in English translation in the Global Voices Online's China section, which also has the best English-translation breaking news on China's live-blogging citizen journalists.

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