Y: With East Asia's rise in world economy in the 80s and 90s, there appears an increasing demand for balance of media influence in this region. This has come as no surprise as western products are pervading the markets and western values seepingsintosvarious aspects of people's life in this region through satellite TV and Internet. Joining us now is Professor Yoichi Shimatsu, currently a visiting scholar with Tsinghua University.

　　Y: What can you tell us about the ongoing information warfare<注1> in this region as well as across the Atlantic Ocean?

　　S: Unfortunately we have to call it a warfare, but it certainly looks like that. We see the increasing monopolization of the mediaswheresgreater financial interests are taking over local media, and this trans-Atlantic war has occurred. For example, the Vivendi<注2> problem was an attempt by French interest to reverse Hollywoodization of Europe. It is not merely a media conflict in terms of editorial policy, but financial conflicts in some of the largest corporations in the world.

　　Y: There is now a growing concentration of media ownership in the hands of a few media moguls<注3> around the world, so what can we do to break up the monopoly?

　　S: Yeah, this is a serious problem. Some outstanding American newspapers, for example, Baltimore Sun<注4>, which used to be edited by the legendary journalist H.L. Mencken, was taken over by Los Angeles Times<注5>. And Los Angeles Times was then taken over by Chicago Tribune<注6>. So small fish are getting swallowed by big fish and big fish are getting swallowed by the bigger fish. This is very problematic because it affects editorial policy. What happened was that Baltimore Sun started running Los Angeles Times' material and then the Tribune service's material rather than generate their own material provided by their own reporters. How we can reverse that is not easy, because those companies that own dozens and hundreds of newspapers are in television, radio and are dominating Internet now. You know, Internet wasn't so much dominated by the monopolies as it is now. So I think some of the strategies that have been trying to open local presses are very brave attempts. A politician in Thailand named Sondhi set up the Asia Times<注7>, but he could not compete against Herald Tribune<注8>, whose status was the object of his goal. There was simply no chance. He just didn't have that kind of powerful distribution network. And he could not attract advertising either. So I think the strategies today, in this decade, have to be a lot more sober<注9> than in the past.

　　Y: Apart from their financial power and technical superiority, western media also have an obvious advantage and that is the English language. Now in Asia, English seems to be the only language that may help Asian countries form a broad coalition<注10>. But it seems there are a lot of difficulties in doing so. What do you think of, say, the importance and role of the Asian Broadcasting Union?

　　S: I've attended some of their meetings. They certainly have worthy ideas. They represent the largest national television networks in Asia. But I think one of their problems is that they are more concerned about their ranking, their rating that would come from their own national audiences. The national audiences are overwhelming. For example, in Thailand, they speak Thai, in Indonesia, that's Indonesian language. So the pressure for the executives in the Asian Broadcasting Union is to cater to their own mass audiences. English seems to be reserved for small business class, for dominating entrepreneurs, for people who work in international sectors. I think we have to get over this mistaken notion<注11>. This is one of the problems in cooperative areas. In the past, we just exchanged, among the newspaper publishers, editorials and commentaries<注12>. There was just no real commitment in developing region-wide English press. And I see we are paying a price for that now. In issues from the delay of China's entering the WTO to the current war on terrorism, Asia basically doesn't have a voice. Unless this voice is in English, I think it will not be heard in Washington, in London and in the power centers.

　　Y: Now, English language media come under two basic categories. One, the media from the west via satellite or Internet and the other, the local, homogeneous media, for example, China Daily or CCTV-9, the English channel of China Central Television. But it turns out that many English media organizations are subjected to the financial support of the local governments. Therefore, the governmental attitudes are very important. Have you ever done any analysis about the governmental behavior in this respect?

　　S: Certainly, I had my share of dealing with government agencies in Japan and working in China. In fact, there is not much difference. There is a very common cultural institutional discourseswheresthere are certainly norms of proprieties in terms of reporting, managing, how you address the issue and when you address the issue. And I think most veteran<注13> editors and reporters are under certain protocols of this. We still do a lot of investigative reports and some very good commentaries are written. But I think one of the problems here is again that the government's interest is overwhelmingly to take care of the people at home, of the native language audiences rather than to reach out to the world. This is again somewhat mistaken. You know, the nature of monopoly is to dominate the market and insgroupsto do that it has to cut down cost, so an effective way is to direct the market to a single-language publication.

　　Y: So what can be done about this?

　　S: Well, I think one thing that has to be stressed is that global media today are based in two capitals, New York and London. However, there is no reason why there cannot be a third capital in Asia. Obviously China seems to be the place.

　　Y: Why not Tokyo, for instance?

　　S: We have five big media groups that have fierce competition. Actually, they compete so fiercely that it becomes economically unviable<注14> for Tokyo to be that third capital. The second problem is, although there are many English language readers in Tokyo, they are well served by the press, whereas China seems to have a critical mass<注15>. People are open to learning English. I walk to the parks in the morning and I hear people reading and reciting English.

　　Y: That may be one of the good results of this fever for English language learning that has lasted for two decades.

　　S: Yeah (laugh), obviously, there should be a place for a new center of international communications in English. I mean, the Chinese market is big enough. Also, I think the advertising revenue is another question. There certainly will be a few hurdles<注16> that had to be overcome. But certainly Beijing and Shanghai are the places to look for the future generations of media.

　　Y: You accused western media of advocating freedom without the sense of social responsibility. What do you exactly mean?

　　S: One of the problems is... I mean, who can argue with a notion of freedom that people should have freedom and democracy. Of course, everyone welcomes the idea of freedom and democracy. The problem is, however, sometimes Americans would insist on their particular cultural norms or values as the only road to freedom. And they would take no time to look at how people in other countries define their premises of freedom, because freedom, after all, has no universal standard. What you want to do with your life is often defined by the background of your country. Let's take the issue of religious right for example. It has sometimes been sold as the right to propagate<注17> any form of religion anywhere and at any time. This is certainly not what the U.S. Constitution means. They want government to be out of the affairs of religion, but more importantly, they want religion out of the affairs of government. So we see sometimes an absurd position of the U.S. media.