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Barry Wain: an Australian who didn't wait for the 'Asian Century'
Posted By Graeme Dobell on February 7, 2013 @ 13:00
For a start, you’re publishing in the English language. Now that means different things, or it meant different things to different governments at that time. Some were alarmed by the fact that we were influential, others thought it was inconsequential because you are not reaching too many people. Though we reckon we were reaching, or we knew we were reaching the decision makers and the high-income groups, that's for sure.
I inherited a situation in which my predecessors were just absolutely determined to run the paper with the same honesty as they ran The Wall Street Journal in the United States.
I hope we also sort of tempered it with some realism and respect. I don’t mean doctoring stories or going soft on things, but I think going about stories in a sensitive way, doing the reporting honestly but without being deliberately provocative or unnecessarily provocative and that sort of thing. In many cases, or in some cases, just putting down the truth was provocative enough, and it got us into all sorts of trouble. The trouble varied at different times. I mean, at one stage, during martial law in South Korea, the censors were going through the paper and they couldn't speak English. And so they would chop out anything based on words, or anything they didn't quite understand and anything else. So they were sort of delivering it like confetti about two weeks later. But it didn't last that long. In Indonesia, individual copies of the paper, exposes on the Suharto fortune, very well documented pieces, they just banned those successive issues but didn't take any further action against us. Malaysia at one stage banned the paper for three months and expelled both correspondents, and we took them to court. Bless their hearts, the Malaysians are not very well organised and at that stage you could actually take them to court and win a case against the expulsions, and then they concluded they might lose the other one so they caved in and lifted the ban.
Of course, Dr Mahathir then fixed the record there by making the minister's decision not appealable in future to the court. So he closed those sorts of loopholes. But you just have to have enough courage and enough belief that in the end, that it's the truth: that it's worthwhile to run a newspaper honestly and that you don't get anywhere, in fact, if you start watering down stories, or doctoring stories or writing stories to please people. And I think you live and die by that reputation.’
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[1] Image: http://www.aspistrategist.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/f1a06dd6bd187450575c172e1f68051a.jpg
[2] died in Singapore at the age 68: http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5163&Itemid=195
[3] made his life in East Asia and went to the very top of his craft: http://www.iseas.edu.sg/news_content.cfm?news_id=D3F2415D-E2AC-C97C-0382FAD23B19C8F1
[4] biography of Mahathir Mohammad: http://www.lowyinterpreter.org/post/2010/02/04/What-Mahathir-has-done-to-Malaysia.aspx
[5] this interview in 2007: http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2007/s2131639.htm
[6] malaysiakini: http://www.malaysiakini.com/news/220774