A Plate Full of Nonsense

Tom Plate is an adjunct professor of Communications and Public Policy at UCLA and runs the Asia Pacific Media Network, which is a kind of institute that offers "Media News and Views from the Asia Pacific" [sic], and whose motto is Toward a keener sense of community in the Pacific region.

What the APMN actually does is unclear. But it does have a website and we learn that its "Founding Members" include several English language newspapers from around the Pacific Rim, including the Los Angeles Times, the Korea Times, the South China Morning Post from the newly Bolshevized People's Colony of Hong Kong, the Straits Times from the teenage-prankster-caning island of Singapore, and the Jakarta Post from the reporter-clubbing archipelago of Indonesia.

And Tom Plate writes a weekly column about the "Asia Pacific", which the San Francisco Chronicle is thoughtful enough to publish for us most Tuesdays. When reading Plate's columns, one gets the impression that he either doesn't understand what he's writing about, or that he behaves obsequiously towards Asian despots in order to solicit more government-controlled newspapers to pay to join his network, or both.

In an August column, Plate castigates the elected Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian for saying that Taiwan was an “independent, sovereign state", which would only provoke the self-appointed panjandrums in Peking. What chutzpah of those Taiwanese, Plate says, for wanting to be a sovereign state with an elected President, when everybody at the UN agrees that Taiwan rightfully belongs to the Tiananmen tank commanders.

Last month Plate pointed to the Wen Ho Lee case (remember that?) and a single mystery novel that had some Vietnamese gangsters and declared that the media has poisoned public opinion and "planted negativity about Asians in the national psyche". [I have no idea what he is talking about and neither does my wife, who happens to be the daughter of Korean immigrants].

On the Iraq question, Plate wonders aloud why Saddam shouldn't be allowed to have his own nuclear weapons, when the United States and Israel have them too. And he tells us that

The truth is, many people in Asia as elsewhere are turned off by the arguable arrogance of Washington’s gut instinct toward geopolitical moralism, as if only America knows the right thing to do.

And to back this up, he points to Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed, who he admiringly says has been "Head of a largely Islamic nation of a mere 22 million for more than two decades". What Plate leaves out is that Mahathir has kept his office for more than two decades by having the loyal opposition convicted of sodomy. So yes, it often is the case that only America knows the right thing to do, and our elected leaders have both the moral and military authority to operate without taking into account the petty selfish interests of two-bit tyrants like Mahathir Mohamed.

In his most recent columns, Plate is angling to be annointed Pope of Moral Equivalence ("Washington wants to preserve its military option against Iraq but denies that same right to Beijing in its tussle with Taiwan"), and to be crowned Pharoah of Cultural Relativism(dismissing as racist a statement by Australian Prime Minister John Howard that Australia should support the Americans and the British against Iraq because of their similar values and similar view of life.)

I'm sure that Plate's columns are highly regarded by government officials in places where they censor their newspapers, such as Hong Kong and Singapore. But why do UCLA and the Chronicle waste their money on this dreck?

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at October 11, 2002 07:14 AM