Dark Journalism - Forbes.com

An article in July 21th Forbes Asia tells this story of "Dark Journalism" or "Black Journalism" in China. The major incomes of Chinese journalists come from extortion or payoff to cover or uncover the reported target.This might also happens/happened in other countries. Restaurant owners payoff journalists in all sorts of different ways for getting a good review. However it seems to go beyond the extreme of protocol. But who's protocol is it?

Dark Journalism - Forbes.com

Censorship isn't the only thing wrong with Chinese reporting. The other one is a current of corruption

"There are many mines that have their own media consultant," says journalist Wang Keqin, who has investigated illegal mines in Shanxi. "Once the mine has an accident, all the reporters come, and the mine's media consultant would give red envelopes based on what kind of media you are. CCTV might get 50,000 to 100,000 [yuan, or $7,250 to $14,500], Xinhua might get 50,000. For provincial level media, it could be 30,000, and for small newspapers it could be a couple thousand to 20,000. This money is called the 'make-you-shut-up fee,' and it's also called the 'media public relations fee.'" Xinhua, for its part, denies having had any case of corruption in recent years and says it would fire a journalist found to have taken hush money.

I recently encountered an interesting episode heard at work. Someone had called up a company claiming to negotiate a huge order on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party. The buyer claimed to be a liaison trading company for the communist party. "I am buying these for the government", he said.

The process dragged for a month with proposals of under table percentage, finding a broker accpeted by both sides. Finally the order faxed, the broker traveled to China to sign the contract, brought more gifts paid off all the "entertainment" fees. It turned out to be a fraud.

These reminded me of Jared Dimond notion in his "Guns, germs and steel" . Except for the geo-ecological conditions, civilization needs large & dense populations so there are diversifications of functions in the entity. Are we going to see China cilivation emerging to conquer the world for the next couple of decades?

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Food prices | An expensive dinner | Economist.com

Food prices | An expensive dinner | Economist.com: "Today about 850m people, mostly women and children, remain chronically hungry while 1.1 billion are obese or overweight"

The WFP’s food costs increased by more than 50% over the past five years. Ms Sheeran predicts that they will increase by another 35% in the next couple of years too.

Ms Sheeran refers to this as the post food-surplus era.

Writing about small things -- how to travel with a salmon

Well.. to be honest, it's a curiosity how a person can write on the most tedious things. Maybe it makes sense when that person is a professor of semiotics. (which you can find a very detailed explanation in wikipedia)

Although the small things are really samll, the writing itself nevertheless is very amusing.

For example, in the "How to use the Taxi Driver", how Eco writes about taxi drivers in different countries is really funny.

> ... instead of the corner of Seventh and Fourteenth, you want to go th Charlton Street. The driver will then have a tantrum, slam on the brakes, and make you get out, becuase New York drivers know only the streets with numbers and not those with names.

Paris taxi drivers, on the other hand, do not know any streets at all.

In New York, as far as I can tell you can't summon a taxi by telephone to some club; in Paris you can; but they don't come. In Stockholm you can call them only by phone, becuase they don't trust any old stranger walking along the street.

German drivers are courteous and correct. They don't speak, they just press the accelerator. When you get out, white as a sheet, you realize why they come to Italy for relaxation and drive in front of you, doing sixty kilometers per hour in the fast lane.

Nice, huhh?

In the "How to Use the Coffeepot from Hell", he writes about coffee. Here he goes

There are several ways to prepare good coffee.... Each coffee, in its own way, is excellent. American coffee can be a pale solution served at a temperature of 100 degrees centigrade in plastic thermos cups, usually obligatory in railroad stations for purposes of genocide..

.... Swill-coffee is something apart. It is usally made from rotten barley, dead men's bones, plus a few genuine coffee beans fished out of the garbage bins of a Celtic dispensary. It is easily recognized by its unmistakable odor of feet marinated in dishwater. It is served in prisons, reform schools, sleeping cars, and luxury hotels.