Brunei, the problem being............

In the summer I went to Borneo with the family on a trip which was partly paid for by the Shangri-la hotel chain and partly by Royal Brunei Airlines. The deal is that you write about it for the travel pages (which rarely have much money) and the carriers subsidise you. They get a box next to the text, and the usual rubric is "X travelled with...." etc.

RBA (an excellent airline, by the way) paid for my economy class return and charged the other four tickets at cost. In addition they put us up for the night in Brunei, and we flew on to Sabah in Malaysian Borneo the next day. And all that was fine. As long as you don't feel obliged to write things you don't believe then the ethics of the situation are, I think, manageable.

On return I discovered that a Brunei press agency had reported our visit, and quoted me as saying this: "I am amazed at the truly warm Bruneian hospitality and the people are very friendly. Brunei is such a beautiful country which offers a variety of exciting activities for leisure or short visits."

My critical friends unsurprisingly seized upon these comemnts. Here was old Aaronovitch, soi-disant hammer of the despots getting a freebie to the East Indies and in return bigging up that autocratic zillionaire, the Sultan of Brunei. Hypocrite.

Well, here's drinking to disappointment. As should have been obvious from the words in the quote, I never said them. Not a single one. The entire quote is a fabrication, constructed, I imagine by an over-zealous agency reporter (who I didn't meet) who realised that his piece required a bit of direct speech.

Ironic, isn't it? The columnist who was misquoted. 

Comments

[David T]

Welcome to blogland, David.

[Jon]

Whether or not you said what the reporter said you did is by the by.

Credible independent journalists don't do junkets and write advertorials. That's basically what you are required to do when Shangri-la and Royal Brunei Airlines pay your way.

Sure, it's a job, I can think of worse livings, and I know perfectly decent people who do it. But they are essentially in advertising, and are upfront about it (to their credit) and are not doing independent journalism.

So why did you accept the gig to move into advertising, David?

[Jon]

But you are right about Ming!

[Fancclown]

Yes, but were the words the reporter constructed for you what you actually thought?

[Sarah Hague]

Indeed, that fabricated quote is remarkably unlike anything you would write and why anyone might have thought you wrote it is really rather bewildering.

Still, maybe it was good material for taking the piss...

Good to see you start blogging, by the way. Blogs are one of my preferred areas of the online newspapers.

[bruschettaboy (proprietor of "aaronovitch watch")]

Oh come on you must admit it was hilarious, and the stilted phrasing makes it even more so. I guessed it was a fabricated (or at least wildly embellished) quote but it was much funnier to pretend otherwise.

Just one point of fairness; I don't think we ever actually accused you of being a hypocrite, although a few commenters did - the Sultan doesn't really have all that bad a human rights record and the quote doesn't actually mention the political situation in Brunei anyway. Our line was more that Nick Cohen was a bit daft to fulminate so wildly about junkets to undemocratic states; we were On Your Side on this one, albeit that, as Private Eye has shown over the years, it is always both a good laugh and probably vaguely culturally healthy to police the boundary between journalism and advertisement with a bit of mockery.

I do think that there is real issue though; where does one draw the line in terms of accepting the trips? Would you have accepted one to the Maldives? If anything, the human rights situation is worse in Borneo than in Brunei. Would you go on a trip to Cuba, or would you say that the Times Travel section shouldn't cover trips to states with poor human rights records (Turkey?)

PS: Congratulations on the new blog!! I suppose a reciprocal link is out of the question.

[Gerry Smith]

So, you wish to be a weblogger, an entirely egotistical, vain and narcisissistic pursuit of the terminally arrogant. And if talking about yourself at 12:22pm is the best you have to offer may I suggest you get off to the bookshop and buy something decent to read. But to prattle-on about someone writing about YOU when you've been snuffling in the gravy bowl is just too grotesque.

By the way, you fail to relate exactly how much the airline "partly paid" and how much the hotel group "partly paid" and how much you "partly paid". Presumably such facts are too mundane and irrelevant for the average Times reader. Freebies for you, the wife and kids are presumably fine, just so as YOU are never misquoted - which is positively laughable coming from a 'journalist'.

That spew of arrogant and borish blog reads as the word itself sounds.

Never mind laddie, it's almost time for school to end, best get back to your mirror.

[bruschettaboy]

Bike on a Christ, people. I am guessing that all the people blethering about "reputable, independent journalists" are Yanks who have been through the journalism schools which are responsible for creating that country's uniquely boring and worthless media. If you are not Yanks, stop behaving like prudish Yank journalism majors.

Travel freebies are a perk of the job for a journalist. Sure, they probably wouldn't exist in Plato's Republic, but this is a sin on the level of putting a couple of gins from the minibar on expenses against company policy; it's a little thing that makes life more bearable. The idea that Dave (who at my guesstimate is on a decent six figure deal at the Times) could be corrupted by five grand's worth of flights and hotels is about as ridiculous as the idea that any serious damage might have been done if he was. Is the fabric of democracy really endangered by a few question marks over whether the reclining seats on Brunei Airways are really as luxuriously lovely as the Times say they are? Grow up.

I do think there is a real issue here but it is the issue that Nick Cohen recently discussed with respect to the Maldives; how politics and tourism interact with one another. The thing about journalists on junkets (and the occupational hazard of being stitched up with quotes about the famous hairy-arsed macaques) is just knockabout fun.

[Jon]

Bruschettaboy

There is clearly nothing wrong with junkets, but the folk I know in the trade know what they are involved in is advertising not journalism.

"Travel freebies are a perk of the job for a journalist."

Incorrect. There are many journalists who do not go on junkets. In fact, the better journalists tend not to.

[P. Froward]

Please keep ellipses to three dots, or, umm, I think it's supposed to be four if there's a full stop after it, or whatever. I'm sure there must be somebody at the Times who keeps up with the details.

Anyhow: Twelve is too many. Twelve is a obscenely triumphalist waste of precious resources in a world wracked by hunger, disease, war, and environmental devastation. Twelve is well outside any imaginable bounds of civilized human behavior. Twelve is the kind of hideous atrocity we have come to expect from the despotic, mass-murdering criminal terrorist religious fanatic Bush. It is the Americans, with their cowboy ways and their high-tech keyboards, who have devastated the third world with cold-bloodedly careless punctuation. And none dare speak in protest.

[Luniversal]

When The Independent launched 20 years ago, it had a strict policy of paying its own way. Andreas Whittam Smith had a down on freebies, of a piece with his dislike of the Lobby.

Don't know if today's Indie maintains the first tradition, though.

[peter]

I can assure the above poster that the Independent - despite its appearance of piety - is just as voracious a consumer of 'freebies' as any other newspaper in the Fleet Street diaspora.

[bruschettaboy]

Well exactly, and what was gained by Whittam Smith's "Operation Hairshirt"? Nothing as far as I can tell. (not being part of the Lobby is a different matter because it means that your hands aren't tied with respect to the reporting of sources)

Richard Littlejohn doesn't go on freebie trips; there is simply no correlation. The interesting thing here is that it was a trip to two regimes with problematic human rights situations (Brunei and Borneo, albeit that neither is exactly Amin's Uganda) and the piece didn't mention it; was there a duty to? This issue would arise whoever paid for the trip.

[Jon]

Bruschetta boy

Poor argument, try again.

I contend the best journalists avoid freebie trips. That does not preclude that possibility that bad journalists can miss them too.

Think of the some of the best journalists. Do they go on freebie trips and write advertorials?

Take Robert Fisk, widely respected in his field: When was the last time he took money from an airline and hotel chain to write a favourable article?

Who you kidding Bruschettaboy?

[Actualy in Asia]

Moderated and edited coments are fine - i however prefer to remain anonomous on the web because of where i live.

Re the posted comments on the human rights situation in the country of borneo i suggest they who have posted try to take it up with the government of borneo - which of course dores not exist.

Borneo is an island with three countries on it Brunei, two of malaysia's states (Sarawak and Sabah (Sabah is where the two shangri-la hotels are)) and the indonesian state of kalimantan (which is about 2/3 of the island.

Human rights are Ok in malaysia (a democracy of sorts)not so sure about brunei an absolute monarchy and par for the course in indonesia a democracy (now) with severe corruption probelms and ethnic unrest.

I dont trust people who dont even know what counries are to give me any indication of human rights there.

[bruschettaboy]

[I contend the best journalists avoid freebie trips.]

on the basis of no evidence at all. I contend that lots of very good journalists do go on freebie trips, and the fact that we are having this debate on the David Aaronovitch weblog suggests that I am not far off right.

[When was the last time he took money from an airline and hotel chain to write a favourable article?]

This would be an entirely different matter, because 1) it would involve taking money and 2) it would involve committing to write a favourable article.

I didn't say that Borneo was a country, and to be honest I question the local knowledge of someone claiming to be "actually in Asia" who thinks that "human rights are OK" in Malaysian Borneo; there are plenty of documented cases of violations with respect to the indigenous people there.