HONG KONG'S SATIRICAL NEWS MAGAZINE
Founding Editor : Dr George Adams
EDITION 2 IS PUBLISHED 11TH AUGUST 2008
Me and My Chopsticks: Allan Zeman / Streets of Shame / RTHK Balls / Desperate Barristers / Enid Fenby / The Asia Sentinel / John Pilger / Hemlock's Diary / Lookalikes / The Things They Say / Patsy's Last Letter / Agony Aunt / Expat of The Week / Games Hong Kong People Play / HK Hookers of The Week and much much more...
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The second edition will not be available as a download except to subscribers.
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Launched before 1997 in reaction to the sale of the SCMP by Rupert Murdoch to Peking-friendly billionaire Robert Kuok, in exchange for satellite broadcasting rights in Mainland China, NOT The South China Morning Post was Hong Kong's first notable "blog" or "e-zine" in English. It challenged and satirised both the Post and society in general, quickly gaining a strong following with regular visitors from all over the world. Some of our earlier work is posted here, archived by our former staffer Hemlock. Recent NTSMCP web content is no longer accessible from this page directly but can be viewed via the search engines.
NTSCMP has sometimes been embroiled in controversy. Shortly after we went online, the South China Morning Post attempted to shut us down or at least emasculate us, demanding we remove all the material from their web site we had chosen to satirise, re-interpret or otherwise use in our argument against them. Subsequently, we became involved in a long online debate with veteran journalist Jonathan Fenby, then editor of the Post, over issues of the Post's demonstrable self-censorship, slanted reporting and disinformation together with its de facto control by a former China Daily supervising editor appointed by the owner Robert Kuok. The leading publishing magazine Editor and Publisher picked up the story and the Post was shamed before the whole publishing world. Fenby was later sacked by an irate SCMP board, partly for misjudging the power of the Internet.
More recently, NTSCMP was believed by many to have been blocked by the Li Ka Shing owned PCCW and Hutchison Broadband Internet service providers following a series of revelations about the Li-owned ParkNShop supermarket's overpricing as well as the long-standing monopolies and public foolishness of the Li family. There was a public outcry and dozens of complaints were lodged with the Hong Kong Government. The Apple Daily newspaper picked up the story and access to NTSCMP on the Li-owned servers was miraculously restored shortly thereafter.
We have now decided to make ourselves available as a monthly print edition. The non-profit motive and commitment to press freedom continue. At a time when Hong Kong's local English press has further atrophied to two self-censored, Peking-aligned money making machines plus a plethora of free handouts and leisure guides, it seems a good idea to try something different in the more concrete arena of print. Perhaps a trip to the news-stands will become interesting again and international visitors will gain an impression that we are not Singapore or Peking - yet.
Contact NTSCMP via ntscmp@live.com
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BBC WORLD NEWS WEB SITE CENSORED IN HONG KONG
This went on all morning and lunch time today 5th August 2008.Others have confirmed the same. Are we being censored again in Hong Kong? By whom? The image in question was viewable on the Internet in the UK. It was replaced by a more innocuous pic after some time, the BBC clearly responding to the situation.
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POSTBALLS IN THE WETLANDS
OUR STAFF REPORTER WRITES:
An old colleague of mine forwarded the good-news 'infomercial' pushed in Friday's SCMP. My interest in this is that I was one of the company's original team of 30 environmental scientists who worked on the Hong Kong Wetland Park project. The environmental scientists had to battle the company's civil engineers for months on end to get the wetland off the concept page. Calvin Lam (quoted in the story) had nothing whatsoever to do with the project inception - he wasn't even in the B&V office at the time. The then project manager repeatedly tried to kill off the constructed wetland. Right up to the moment when it was selected as HK's award winning millennium project when he suffered a change of heart and elbowed his way forward to collect the award from Anson Chan. Thereafter, he rewrote his CV to boast his environmental credentials. I can't remember whether he hung around long enough to take part in the boardroom coup at the end of 2002 which resulted in the environmental team being cut back to around 5 staff.
The article's writer (probably on the advice of B&V's engineers) still doesn't have the hang of the constructed wetland concept. The purpose was not 'educating the public', nor raising public awareness (those were peripheral benefits), nor does it maintain 'a constant supply of fresh water.
The primary purpose was always to mitigate for the loss of the fishponds (in the Ramsar area) which had been filled in to reclaim land for Tin Shui Wai (the article omits that this environmental destruction was B&Vs big idea in the 1980s!). The second driver was to try to clean up the highly polluted water pouring into Inner Deep Bay (close to Mai Po mudflats). The fear was that if the construction of a 300,000 population new town in the area didn't drive out the wildlife, the new town's inhabitants would finish the job off. So the wetland was also designed to act as a buffer between the town and the nature reserve (SSSI).
The environmental monitoring of the birdlife and wetland ecology throughout the new town construction was continually undermined by the B&V engineers and completely ignored by the EPD. Most of the site engineers had no idea what they were supposed to be constructing and the wetland had to be substantially re-engineered under the supervision UK specialists WWT.
The tail end of the article is just wish-list hogwash. Unrecognisable to the company's last few wage slaves. Career development, training? The last time one of my old colleagues asked for some training, our manager laughed her out of the office with the words 'Training? You've got to be joking. We'll muddle through like we've always done.'
RTHK BALLS
Possibly one of the shortest, and almost certainly the most mumbling and self-censored presentation at the Radio Asia conference in Singapore this year must have been that offered by Hugh Chiverton on behalf of RTHK Radio 3. The years of Chiverton at Radio 3 have seen an almost complete erosion of free speech for the masses in Hong Kong who happen to speak English more than Chinese. The Open Line programme was axed and replaced by Chiverton's short, bitty programme called Backchat with only one or two listener e-mails read out and often no callers on air at all, even if anyone felt it worthwhile to lift up the phone. The programme is always with safe, predictable invited contributors and the theme of discussion is sharply defined. Important "foreigner" groups like Filipinos, are given pisspoor representation in token programming. The social cause of thousands of Thais and Indonesians is hardly catered for at all. As a Government broadcaster, RTHK is bound to be challenged under the looming discrimination legislation for not providing commensurate service to all the unmobilised masses of maids, drivers, restaurant slaves and others for whom Radio 3 is a welcome background noise to drudgery. An ecstasy of fumbling in programming and PR obviously looms.
THE POST COMES OUT
What this? Post undercover journalists posing as same-sex couples rejected by suspicious or simply primitive motel desk clerks in Kowloon Tong. And special features on gay websites blocked to right-thinking researchers at City University. Yes, 2008 is the summer the Post came out: almost. Cynics or the merely unkind say that Post journalists - seedy, facially challenged, malodorous and poor-looking - are constantly refused entry by hostelries and hotels anyway, and rightly so. Then there is the point that the filtering mechanisms on the Internet are notoriously inefficient, censorious and downright daft. But more pressing than that comes the objection that the Post is a haven for the prejudiced and discriminatory in many ways. Local reporters are routinely paid half the salary of imported staffers from the South Shields Bugle. Women are hardly ever given real positions of responsibility but marched off to Features or the Magazine. Ageism on the other hand seems to work in reverse and silly old expat duffers are allowed to waffle on well into their dotage. As usual, the best story is with the journalists themselves and the daily hypocrisy they live in, cover up and only selectively reveal.
SPECIAL UPDATE:
THE MISSING ARMSTRONG
Completely missing from the Post's superficial and misinformed court report of the Kevin Egan proceedings before the Hong Kong Court of Appeal has been the name of David Armstrong, editor of the Post when the newspaper did a deal with the ICAC and the Department of Justice to shop Egan and others in return for immunity from prosecution on a charge of disclosing the identity of a person under the care of the Witness Protection Programme. Armstrong, a drinking buddy of Egan, and present when important admissions were made to a key witness at a party by leading conspirator Andrew Lam, was mysteriously kicked upstairs rather than sacked after the scandal broke. He was then given a plum job at the Bangkok Post, possibly to get him out of the way before more embarrassing questions arose at the appeal. The most embarrassing question would be of course whether the Post's owners, the Kuok family, knew of the affair and whether they too feared the six o'clock knock from the ICAC. The Kuok family do have a hands-on approach to their newspaper and it is easy to imagine that such a faithful retainer as Armstrong may have discussed the matter wth them. Like the Kuoks' scandalous involvement with biofuels, it is yet another scoop the Post is strenuously avoided.
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PAGE ONE – KOWLOON TONG
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PAGE ONE – TIMES SQUARE
PARK’N SHOP-GREAT FOOD HALL
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VARIETY
Our first review :
WHO WILL buy a magazine full
of material that has already appeared on the Internet? My
hunch is no-one. It’ll never sell. But
that’s what they said about the Sony Walkman, silent nail
clippers and Wellington boots for dogs. It takes a
particularly eccentric visionary to ignore the cynics, the
sneers, the hoots of doubt and the hints at lunacy and go for
it. As a skeptic, I am surprised to find the publication in
question. Not the South China Morning Post has materialized and
appears on my desk this morning, along with the word that
Bookazine will be carrying it, as will some branches of Park N
Shop – between the melon flavoured soy milk and the
two-for-one sour cream and onion Pringles.
Assuming, that is, that the supermarket’s ultimate owner Li
Ka-shing is OK with the two unflattering photos of his son,
various unkind references to the Communist Party, assorted
rudeness about Hong Kong and Mainland politicians, large dollops
of bad taste and some slapdash layout. Chunks of a certain
on-line diary, partly mutilated, occupy a generous amount of
space, as do classic highlights from the NTSCMP archives.
Insults about RTHK Radio 3 fill a bit over half a page and
another half page is devoted to mockery of the Standard. The
South China Morning Post is honoured with over a page of vicious
skewering. So coverage of the magazine’s launch in the
Hong Kong English-language media is unlikely to be intense or
positive – unless someone takes action for libel or at least
copyright infringement. And there’s some nasty stuff
about lawyers, too.
The answer to the question, apparently – people who
don’t read things on-line.
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