Mood:
a-okTopic: independent media
“Something big is happening next week at the Epoch Times” bugled this weekly freebie thin newspaper about a month ago.
Sure enough it went from Sydney City Hub, or more well known, Daily Telegraph tabloid size to broadsheet Sydney Morning Herald size.
The SMH is going through its own changes too, from CBD location to fringe CBD at Pyrmont in 2007 sometime. One feels a certain corporate security rationale in this age of rocket launcher home grown errorism for the decision to side step the allure of the CBD though to be fair their main competition News Ltd has been on the fringe for decades at Holt St, Surry Hills.
SAM’s editor is paid to deliver the Hub for Alternative Media Group, and noticed the internationally diverse Epoch Times of strong Asian, and anti ‘Communist’ Party of China flavour, at least a year ago. It was difficult to find them via google last time I tried but its all laid out here now:
http://en.epochtimes.com/aboutus.asp
About a year ago ET was in many of the same 600 odd inner city outlets I visited each month. I have seen it well beyond the inner city now too.
I got worried. With all that blue colour format I wondered is it a Liberal Party front, and said so at one outlet, Balmain public library. But it became clear it was Taiwanese based from the content, anti China government essays, prominent human rights and Falung Gong stories, and indeed some quite good original reporting with solid editorial values over actual news. I get the impression it is challenging the Murdoch in bed with China business relationship, and the spin up to the Bejing Olympics in 2008.
I could deliver a paper like this I thought.
At the local pool recently it was the only reading material to hand (January 3-9, 2007) and I was impressed with the probity of their stories: “Tourists ignore Thai bombings” a view I had heard from various young travellers and friends direct this summer Sydney. Then this ‘amusing’ story about the inscrutable “Chinese espionage difficult to contain” quoting one Mr Appel who “worked as an FBI special agent for 20 years” and how trips to the Wall and duchessing with cakes and food generally is a tactic for cooption of westerners. Also defector Chen Yonglin in the story. That’s of interest.
( I had to laugh at a parallel quote coincidentally read at the pool next day in the Latham Diaries Friday 28th February 2003 on a delegation to China “My 42nd birthday …Zhou Enlai had been good enough to organise a cake”!)
ET ran a solid ‘anti capital punishment for Saddam’ story quoting Kevin Rudd not seen in other press, but echoing mainstream cartoonists savaging the censorship of witness to USA dealings in the 1980s.
Another good tip straight off the AAP about ‘Warren Mundine’s NSW Native Title Services’ with Warren involved in a big Githabul land use agreement in NSW, but also till recently the tragic Palm Island death in custody case. Could be related as I wondered if Mundine had been mollified over the latter by the former. And so it goes on with serious news mostly unlike so much in News Ltd or even Fairfax. A bit of local Asian business advertising but not much. A bit stern and light on infotainment to really expand circulation but one day maybe.
A story about an incredible “50,000 environmental protests” in China last year in ‘International firms blamed for China’s pollution increase’ expediently labelled “environmental colonialism” by the dictatorship there, while airbrushing the role of numerous major local companies pumping up the industrialisation. This story was echoed on ABC Radio National this morning (13 days later, January 16th) with the solid journo Paul Barry.
Yes, Epoch Times is an impressive small newspaper and should be added to the independent media diversity bracket challenging the monolithic News Ltd and Fairfax here.
