John Roughan: All dirty laundry has much the same look

Some courageous people can be found in the news trade and they are not necessarily the investigative terriers who report their discoveries in heroic style.

It takes curiosity, care and conviction to chase a good story but seldom courage. The people who put themselves on the line in this business are journalists drawn from ethnic minorities.

I am not talking about those missionaries employed for charter programmes on public radio and television or magazines devoted to their cultural uplift. They provide a dull diet of repetitive social research, soft interviews with familiar figures and predictable coverage of festivals and funerals. Not much of it engages their own people, I suspect, let alone the rest of the population.

The truly courageous are those who report anything interesting they can find, the Maori journalist, for example, who can go to the anniversary of the Tainui Queen's coronation and cover the fruitless attempt to cobble together a Waikato River transfer for the occasion, or the embarrassment that the Queen gave the Destiny Church a seat of honour.

These topics may seem mild to a general audience but they are not what minorities have in mind when they urge the media to take an interest in them. And they can be cruel to those who tell their tales.

Ethnic communities are no different in this respect from any other section of society. Business and sports organisations and charitable causes all want public notice but only on their own terms. They can give a cold shoulder to those assigned to cover their affairs when they find their problems and tensions in the news.

But when a reporter offends his own people, it is not in the same league. Ethnic identity lies deep in everyone. Exclusion hurts.

Lincoln Tan, a Chinese columnist writing in the Herald last Monday, described how his ethnic allegiance was questioned after he helped the paper produce an article on Chinese prostitution in this country.

His column prompted an editorial that attempted to explain how honest, warts-and-all reporting serves the interests of all communities. But that only brought us a taste of the slew of invective he was talking about.

"You are called a Chinese reporter by the New Zealand Herald today and I think you must correct them," began one anonymous message. "You are not Chinese and you are not fit enough to even smell Chinese feet. I hope you do not claim to be king when you are not even fit to be servant. Are you ashamed to be Singaporean?"

Another said we were "naive to think Mr Lincoln Tan is a Chinese reporter. He is not a Chinese at all, just like what he said in your paper yesterday. And we don't think he is, either."

In fact he described himself as ethnic Chinese, which mainlanders evidently consider not quite kosher. He said he feels more Chinese here than he did growing up in Singapore, eats more Chinese food, buys more in Chinese shops, has more Chinese friends, though not from the mainland.

Tan is tough. Producing a fortnightly English language newspaper for migrants here, you would need to be. But it must hurt to have your ethnic identity denied by some of those you are trying to serve.

Serve is the word, but the honest toiler does not want to be too grand about it. Journalism, like all industries, serves the greater good by satisfying itself. We chase what we find interesting, which might not be strictly important.

When challenged we invoke "the public's right to know" but the motive is much more mundane. Everybody loves being the bearer of news. The motive of the most intrepid reporter is exactly the same as that of the Beehive courier who picked up a paper from the shredding tray in the Prime Minister's department a few weeks ago and decided to show it to his friend at Telecom.

Had he passed the document to a reporter some lucky news outlet would have had a break on a big announcement and the name of Michael Ryan would still be unknown to the public. But he wouldn't have had the satisfaction of telling the story.

He wanted the ordinary human pleasure of showing what he had found to someone he knew would be very interested. He didn't want his mate to make use of the information in any way; simply to widen his eyes and start to chew on the news.

That, at least, was the conclusion of the State Services investigation. People in the news business possibly have accepted the absence of a darker purpose more readily than others might.

Sharing information is immensely satisfying. Mr Ryan's friend, Peter Garty, who had a duty to tell his company what he had discovered, would have been less than human if he did not enjoy the sensation, too.

The genuine heroes in this business are in it for exactly the same pleasure as the rest of us. They like telling a story, but they have to do it with burdens the majority do not carry. Whether they want to be, they will be expected to be role models and representatives of their minority. When they report its deficiencies and disputes they know, and the community knows, they are probably feeding prejudices in the rest of the population.

They need to remind themselves, more than the rest of us, that is only through frank discussion that everyone discovers everybody's laundry looks much the same.