Unspun

Apparently my rant on the Hong Kong Ronin and the lack of a good read (Where have all the good reads gone?) in the newspapers in Asia touched some chords among some journalists.

One journalist, a Westerner who has been in Asia for some time and now based in Jakarta e-mailed me to say:

Mind you, how good a job have the Singaporeans – or the Malaysians – for that matter -in reporting on their respective countries(for very understandable reasons.) “Um, er, Lee Kuan Yew, the great father of our nation….,” or “Datok Mahatir, the great father of our nation…”. Part of the advantage of foreigners is they can risk pissing off a government to the point it’ll kick them out.

But overall, I tend to agree. The Indian and Filipino editors I've had and have are much more sensible about chronic problems like corruption -meaning they're better placed to focus on the real problems.

The strongest anti-White sentiment (an under appreciated form of racism) in the media has come from Singapore. It's not the notion of a racialhierarchy they mind – it's the fact they don't feel like they're at the top.
A close second are the Indonesian nationalists who resent any opinion
coming from a person with less melanin than they have. The shallow excuses is "we were colonized for 350 years — I'm not going to take your crap."(reality check: colonized for 100 years by the Dutch and 1,000 years byIndonesian kings and Rajas).

Even so, I realise it's a sensitive topic.

Asiaweek had a nice chemistry going. They extended their notion of
Asianness to Westerners who had "assimilated"…