Let's get my obligations out of the way first. For the sake of the wizened little chap at the Taipei City Government who pores over the English-language media looking for infractions with a magnifying glass in one hand and a crumbling dictionary in the other, here is the mandatory warning: Excessive consumption of alcohol can damage your health.
Right. All done. Are we ready? Good.
Journalism is one of the few professions in which expenses arising from alcoholism (including, but not limited to, consumption of beverages and treatment for liver disease, gout, stroke and mental illness) should be declared a work expense and thus claimable as a tax deduction.
How do journalists expect to get the juice when they're not prepared to get juiced up?
The way to ingratiate yourself with a prospective informant is not through your personality, intelligence or experience but through sluice-lubricating amounts of alcohol -- at least half of which must be on your tab. Alcohol builds trust -- and acts as a truth drug to boot for most hapless souls.
The thing to remember is that a good chunk of the informants who you ply for an exclusive are desperately lonely people who need a good ale or two to break down the barriers of mistrust and paranoia. After six or seven beers (or whiskeys, or tequila shots), then a quick trip to the local convenience store to replace the nutrients you lost throwing up in the urinal, then an hour or two at a nearby KTV singing shitty songs at half tempo waited on by female sociology undergrads from National Taiwan University in slinky uniforms -- who you tip a couple of hundred NT dollars to flash their frontals at said informants (your guest's pick-up line: "Aren't you a friend of my daughter?") -- after all this, you finally might have a story you can milk for a couple of weeks.
If you can remember what your informant told you.
The problem is that Taiwanese reporters are so poor and poorly paid that most of the time they can only treat their would-be Deep Throats to a bowl of pork rice (luroufan, 滷肉飯) and diluted oolong tea from some of the nastier roadside stalls.
If they're entertaining someone really knowledgeable, the newspaper's staff cafeteria is the place to impress (and if anonymity is required, the interviewee is asked to dress as Guan Gong (
But such cheapskate entertaining can only score a scoop if the informant has been spurned by somebody of consequence. If it's a Taiwanese Watergate you're looking for, the best place to find one is along the banks of the Keelung River.
Lately, the reporters at the United Daily News (UDN) have had even more to worry about. Not only are these guys led to believe that exclusives on the interracial sex lives of friends qualifies as top-rung journalism (see last week's column), now the poor bastards are having their laptop privileges cut.
No, I'm not talking about "senior reporters" losing strip club allowances during overseas assignments. I'm talking laptop computers: The most fundamental weapon in the contemporary journalist's armory.
Media Watch (目擊者, literally: "eyewitness") is a magazine aimed at Taiwan's journalists. In last month's edition, we learn from UDN reporter Hsia Jih-ping (夏日平) that the newspaper's reporting staff are up in arms over having to supply their own laptop computers, effective June 1. Like other newspapers, the company used to lend them out. Now the reporters have to cough up their own cash.
But that's OK, because the UDN is offering them interest-free loans to ease the pain. Or they can buy the company-supplied computers at a discount -- but with no technical support come October.
Now that's what I call labor relations.
With this kind of treatment, if you've spent 20 years in the industry, you'll be considered a God of Journalism. But chances are you'll only be making around half the average household income.
And I'm talking about the reporters in the print media, where most of what passes for news originates in our dubious news recycling industry. Imagine the lot of the poor sods who work for the companies that rip off the broadsheets: the cable TV stations.
These guys get paid wages so low that you can only come to one conclusion: Taiwan's media moguls will one day outsource these jobs to construction workers from Thailand and caregivers from the Philippines. There's a bonus for the bosses if they do: The new reporters can be locked up at night to renovate the studio or teach the managers' kids English when Mommy and Daddy go off for a dirty weekend.
Remember, folks: The minimum monthly wage is about to be raised to NT$17,280 (US$522). Not far above that is your average cable news reporter, who gets paid less than NT$30,000, works punishing hours and ends up with no credibility or professional achievement.
Is it just me, or is that irritating, harping monotone that female cable TV reporters adopt partly the result of the sheer terror of not knowing whether they will be able to afford dinner?
And if you're a woman pushing 30 and haven't been given the Svengali treatment by that creepy TV executive who has been eyeing you the last few weeks, you'd better consider another career.
It's like being a Singapore Airlines flight attendant. If you wear a skirt, then pray you don't develop wrinkles.
Otherwise you'll be out on your ass.
Then there are the anchors. More exposure, more potential authority, more marketability. If you are young and beautiful or handsome then the world is your oyster. But things aren't the same these days even for this coveted job.
Johnny understands that after getting rapped over the knuckles by the National Miscommunications Commission for insufficient new content, terrestrial station CTV's digital wing has decided to save money for new programming by offering lowly paid anchor jobs to translators.
Before I go, I must share a report by one Taiwanese media outlet that continues to defy sensible analysis.
In an article on Tuesday on the electoral influence of Taiwanese businesspeople in China, the China Post came up with some conspiracy editorializing so florid that even the pan-blue camp's propagandists seem coherent by comparison:
"Lien [Chan, 連戰], chairman of the Kuomintang then, lost by a paper-thin margin of 0.2 percent [in the 2004 presidential election]. President Chen Shui-bian [陳水扁] was reelected, thanks to sympathy votes cast following a mystery-shrouded shooting in Tainan rumored by some to be an assassination attempt against him orchestrated in Beijing."
"Rumored by some"?
"Orchestrated in Beijing"?
Now I'm forced to take back what I wrote last week. The China Post doesn't make things up; it makes things up while hallucinating on a deadly mixture of fermented Chinese ultranationalism, shots of hubris and XO misinformation.
Whatever the size of their salaries, chugging booze is no remedy for these jokers. But alcohol poisoning might be.
Heard or read something particularly objectionable about Taiwan? Johnny wants to know: dearjohnny@taipeitimes.com is the place to reach me, with "Dear Johnny" in the subject line.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs