It all seemed very awkward, as the heir-apparent doesn’t speak Mandarin and the translator they had with them fumbled through their questions/orders?

The Globe is a joke, and will go the way of virtually all English dailies in Asia that have been set up by dodgy tycoons.

When said shipping, real estate, logging, mining magnate realises he can’t make a profit within five years, the cache of influence quickly fades and only the editorial Killing Fields will placate his accountants.

“The Jakarta Post as it is is already groaning from the difficulty of finding people who can put two sentences together, let alone be able to report accurately, investigate and write well.” Oh man.. I like that one.

I like that how the Globe always hijacks journalists from the Post because they can’t set up a training ground for newbies. Hahahahaha.. smart move. They paid so much that the Post journalists got enticed to work with them.

Unspun is always funny, and I’m wondering how much he gets paid just to worship James, who allegedly tried to buy the Post but got turned down by “the venerable” there.

I’m wondering why the Globe never wrote any story about James, especially when he got a travel ban from the Department of State. A tycoon having a newspaper outlet? C’mon. I’m wondering how journalism is controlled there. Poor thing.

You simply do not have to wait for the paper to get a “feel” for what the paper is going to be like! Just take a look at GlobeAsia and CampusAsia — the agenda and style seems to be pretty self-evident. All about how well Lippo is doing, good corporate governance, the quality of UPH, blah blah blah!

I would suggest that the style might stay the same or at least be very similar no matter who is at the helm…

When I read CampusAsia I always have a little chuckle to myself when I read about ethics and Christian values and then think about James Riady and the manner in which he was caught up in US campaign financing. That experience was not an example of ethical behaviour or the epitomy of good Christian values…

Oh well! I guess I will just have to wait and see what the paper is like when they finally get around to publishing the thing!

http://iht.com/articles/2000/05/23/edkavi.t.php

They said in 2000 that the result of increasing media openness would:

“be that long-festering issues of separatism, cronyism and corruption can at last be discussed away from the political shadows of the past.”

Looking forward to reading in Riady’s new newspaper about cronyism and corruption being discussed.

I wonder what A. Lin Neuman, who seems to have been on the Committee to Protect Journalists, has to say. Indeed, the best protection for journalists now is to find deep-pocketed investors, something he seems to have done.

Informed sources say the former editor in chief of the Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER), David Plott is also helping to set up the paper. FEER, as some recall, presented itself as a beacon of transparency and anti-corruption in Asia, upon its closure in 2004.

Looking forward to the business editorials on stock market transparency, anti-corruption, local campaign donations, and regulatory standards. Also looking forward to those hard-hitting reports on the Lippo Group.

In the 1996 presidential campaign, James Riady was a major campaign contributor to the Democratic Party. In 1998, the United States Senate conducted an investigation of the finance scandal of the 1996 U.S. presidential campaign. James Riady was indicted and pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations by himself and his corporation. He was ordered to pay an 8.6 million U.S. dollar fine for contributing foreign funds to the Democratic Party, the largest fine ever levied in a campaign finance case.[3][4][5][6]

Together with Jim Guy Tucker he established a company called AcrossAsia Multimedia Ltd. Tucker, another former Arkansas governor, had been forced to vacate the governor’s mansion in 1996 due to alleged fraud in the Whitewater scandal. The two had met through Little Rock’s Second Presbyterian Church. With AcrossAsia Multimedia they wanted to build the largest cable TV infrastructure in Indonesia using a company called Kabelvision. The venture was unsuccessful[2].

Today, James Riady lives with his family in Lippo Village, Karawaci, surrounded by security aides. He has been demonized by the media because of his involvement in the campaign financing scandal. Hendardi, an Indonesian human rights activist, once stated that Riady’s “major achievement was to export corruption to the U.S.”[3]

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