From: underdog@leland.Stanford.EDU (Dwight Joe)
Subject: Re: brainwashed
Organization: Miners for a Heart of Gold
Date: Mon, 28 Dec 92 22:53:06 GMT

In article <1hls6vINNmlj@agate.berkeley.edu> robohen@ocf.berkeley.edu
(Henry Robertson) writes:
>Dwight Joe says
>>What these events will do is to expose Japanese society, at large, to
>>a view of the Western mind and society that most Japanese people have
>>never known.  Before these magazines, the only printed source of information
>>about the West seems to have come from Japanese newspapers and magazines
>>that warp the image of the West (mainly the USA) into a society of
>>druggies, rapists, racists, and other unsavory characters.  The USA is
>>painted as a dangerous unhappy place created by the unleashing of
>>"subsersive" social forces like "the women's movement", "the civil rights
>>movement", blah blah.
>>Maybe, now, the Japanese will get a better balanced picture of America.
>>Of course, most Japanese who've actually lived in the USA for an extended
>>period know that the info from Japanese newspapers (in the previous
>>paragraph) is just crock.
>>about the Japanese edition of Newsweek.
>Wrong.  The Japanese edition is run by an independent staff, using cuts &
>pastes as suits their tastes from the English version.  Remember, Newsweek
>is a business, not a scholarly journal embracing progressive values.  They

Virtually all publications are a business.  So what?  CNN is a business
too.  So what?

Eijanaika.

>publish what their audiences want to hear, the perspective they want to see.

I disagree with this.  I consider Newsweek and Time to be fairly balanced
in their reporting _and_ their editorials.  George Will, a conservative
columnist, shares print-space with another liberal columnist in Newsweek.
The principal difference between Newsweek and a more scholarly publication
like the Atlantic Monthly is that Newsweek is directed at the average
American whereas the Atlantic Monthly is targetted at an audience
with a college education or comparable intellect.  

>I have seen the English & Japanese version of Newsweek side-by-side
>before.  Often, their cover stories are entirely different.

I didn't mean to say that the Japanese-edition (JE) of Newsweek is a
translation of the American-edition (AE) of Newsweek.  I agree that there
is some deviation in the content.

Well, I too have seen both magazines side by side.  I would say that the
match is better than 50% and that the cover stories are the same in more than
50% of the cases.

By the way, I've noticed that many Japanese people have little knowledge
or interest in Korea.  However, in one issue of Newsweek in 1991, the cover
story of both the JE and the AE of Newsweek dealt with N. Korea (its
push to build an atomic bomb, its kidnapping of a Japanese girl from
a cabaret in Japan, etc.)

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