Keeping that glint in the eye
NEWS of two American reporters having been sentenced to a labour camp for 12 years in North Korea makes one thing clear: What journalists do is a public service.
And it is commitment like theirs to report on world issues that will keep rookies like me invested in the industry, eyes wide open to its occupational hazards, political nuances and all.
Of course, they are not the first journalists to be prosecuted this way. There are already too many stories of men and women of the press being summarily imprisoned for asking too many questions.
One incident hit especially close to home.
Four years ago, I was an intern with The New Paper when Mr Ching Cheong – a senior journalist with The Straits Times – was arrested.
He had gone to China for research, and was detained there and charged with spying for the Taiwanese government. He was eventually jailed for three years.
His sentence was a big deal in this company, the kind of issue that cuts across newspapers, new media, departments and pay scales.
It even reached across borders, with 500,000 journalists from more than 100 countries signing a petition organised by the International Freedom of Expression Exchange calling for his release.
Though I was just an intern at the time, I put my name to the cause, and religiously followed the mass e-mail messages that doubled as rallying calls to free him.
Today, I think of him again, along with the imprisoned United States journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling.
Working on a story for US television channel Current TV, the two women were arrested in March near the China-North Korea border.
Charged by the Pyongyang government with unspecified ‘grave crimes’ against North Korea and with entering the country illegally, they were sentenced to 12 years of hard labour.
Each time a journalist makes the news in this manner, as Mr Ching did, as Ms Lee and Ms Ling did, it only reinforces for novices like me the dangers of this job, and that it calls for a certain type of person to do it anyway. According to his wife, Mr Ching had gone to China to procure recordings of a former prime minister’s secret interviews. Ms Lee and Ms Ling had been working on a report on human trafficking across the border.
As a rookie reporter, I am deeply impressed by their commitment to pursue what they consider worthwhile news.
Of course, not every journalist is going to be reporting on world hunger, espionage or terrorism. Then again, not every journalist on a heavy beat covers it with a glint in his eye.
And in the end, that glint is what matters: It singles out the ones who are not only obsessed with getting it right, but perfect too.
The examples of Mr Ching, Ms Lee and Ms Ling are inspirations to rookies like me.
I can only hope that such devotion to the work of journalism does not always lead to a bitter end.
Tags: Feng Zengkun
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