 Outside View
(China Daily)
Updated: 2008-07-18 07:33 The farce of bashing China's human rights The West has no moral authority to lecture anyone, including China, about rights and democracy, while respect for liberty is at an historic low in Europe and the US, a columnist said in The Times. Brendan O'Neill, editor of Spiked, said the lowly double standards that informed Western views of the vicious Easterner 60 years ago are being rehabilitated in the modern era by human rights activists, who are calling on Western democracies to put pressure on China over "Tibet problem" and its "human rights abuses". The columnist cited Britain as an example, where "the right to jury trial has been curtailed, Habeus Corpus has been obliterated, and free speech has been curbed through the creation of new thought crimes". Human Rights Watch wants Gordon Brown to pressurize China, but Brown is one of the chief cheque-writers for the destruction of Iraq, which has left an estimated 400,000 people dead. "It's like asking Rose West to open a halfway house for young runaways," the columnist argued. "Why would anyone want Brown, Bush or Sarkozy, all of whom have shown a naked disregard for fundamental freedoms and international stability, to 'educate' the Chinese? People in the moral gutter cannot take the moral highground." While the West occasionally makes "mistakes" - in Iraq and Guantanamo, for example - the East is more naturally "wicked" in the eyes of Western human rights campaigners. What human rights campaigners do are unwittingly rehabilitating the White Man's Burden in relation to the East, the columnist said Women's voices too often missing More women's voices should be heard in opinion pages as newspapers struggle for readership, the president of the Women's Media Center said in The Christian Science Monitor. "The absence of women as op-ed writers is perhaps the most telling marker of the status of women in media," said Carol Jenkins, the president. "To have women missing in action on these pages reinforces a pernicious, if subliminal, view of a woman's perceived capabilities." Women should have an obligation to participate more assertively. "The Women's Media Center advocates the inclusion of women's voices and perspective at every level in the media, including the op-ed pages," Jenkins said. It's important to make this distinction between the writers a newspaper hires to give their take on the world and those people who may submit an op-ed or two a year on subjects in their area of expertise. A publication's staffed opinion writers' pool is a better instrument to judge its fairness, its dedication to diversity. A paper's roster of staff writers reflects its assessment of who is qualified to interpret the world. Using that rule, we must deduce that mainstream media believe men to be far more capable of analytical, reasoned thought. The responsibility for hiring smart, gifted writers of both sexes and all colors and viewpoints belongs to the editors - and it is their failure when they don't. However, the dismal representation of women on the op-ed pages is just the tip of the iceberg. Research from the Annenberg Public Policy Institute found that just 3 percent of the "clout" positions - the owners, publishers, and other ultimate decision-makers - are women. The net effect of this is that almost everything we know about our world is cast through the male perspective. Women are just beginning to catch on to this fact. "Until editors, publishers, and owners demonstrate that they value women's voices and perspectives by hiring women as top-level decisionmakers and regular commentators, women will continue to look at newspaper opinion pages as a medium that does not speak to or for them," Jenkins said. Readers' comments are welcome. Please send mail to Letters to the Editor, China Daily, 15 Huixin Dongjie, Chaoyang District, Beijing, 100029 China. Send faxes to (86-10) 6491-8377. Send e-mail to opinion@chinadaily.com.cn or letters@chinadaily.com.cn or to the individual columnists. China Daily reserves the right to edit all letters. Thank you. (China Daily 07/18/2008 page9) |
