tim's experiment

A moment of enlightenment this morning while reading Alex Lo’s piece in the Post. I have been impressed for a long time with his ability to keep writing five columns a week. This is not a record – someone on the Irish Times, according to legend, wrote six columns a week for 30 years – but five a week is still a lot. Bernard Levin used to do three a week for the London Times, but complained when he stopped that this was too many. I used to have an irregular cycle – one weekly, one fortnightly, one monthly – which meant I occasionally had to do three in a week and it was not easy.  I had a full-time job as well but that was not the problem; inspiration is the critical item, not time.

So here we have Alex churning them out, and I suddenly realised this morning how he economises. There is a standard structure which is used again and again. We start with a local issue. This morning it was Occupy Central’s complaint that the Registrar of Companies had refused to register it as a company because its objectives  – or some of them – were illegal. Mr Lo opined, and this is clearly a good point, that the Occupy Central people were being a little disingenuous in pointing to their legal activities, however numerous. Civil disobedience is what gives the movement its importance and interest, and that is illegal by definition. This takes about half a column. Then we get a bit of international comparison, which gives the writer a chance to show off his cosmopolitan erudition. And then having loaded our tar brush we slap it over all the people we disapprove of, usually defined in very broad terms. Today it’s “many protesters today”, a category so vague that you can say anything about it. More often it’s “the pan-democrats”, although as the P-Ds are not a political party and encompass a very wide range of views this is no real improvement on “some demonstrators” or “many protesters”..

This is a nifty structure which can be used again and again. Start with a small reasonable point, throw in a bit of intellectual decoration, and then blame it all on whichever of your pet hates you feel like. This will save me time in the mornings because now I know how this works I only need to read the first paragraph and the last.

Meanwhile on the op ed page we have an unlikely new star in the local journalistic firmament: Carrie Lam, who has a day job as the Chief Secretary. You would think that having a whole government department devoted to explaining the government line Ms Lam could do without half a page of newsprint. The whole point of journalism is that a professional reporter can get Ms Lam’s thoughts down to about 10 column inches. Reprinting officials’ speeches looks like a way of saving money at the readers’ expense. That is not what bothers me about it, though. After all readers can draw their own conclusions about that question. What bothers me is that the by-line is a lie. Ms Lam does not write her own newspaper pieces, or for that matter her own speeches. This is not the way government works. Senior civil servants have what they conceive to be better ways of using their time. Speeches, articles, and other verbal contributions are written by a PR flunkey. I realise that having an op ed piece by Joe Wong with a little line at the end saying that Joe is the Chief Secretary’s press pusher doesn’t quite have the pizzazz of a piece by the Chief Secretary in person. But there is such a thing as honesty, and pretending that Ms Lam writes for the Post is not it.