CNN/Time Warner obsessed with minor trends in Japanese adult film industry
July 28th, 2008 by James
Apparently last month’s special report in Time Magazine wasn’t enough, so Time Warner had its news network do some extra reporting on elderly porn in Japan:
Looking for more quality journalism? Why not check out the Sydney Morning Herald’s blog post about the man-whores of Tokyo?
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I guess the spirit of WaiWai still lives on…:P
This is nothing new. It isn’t that the foreign correspondents posted to Tokyo are obsessed with 爺さん porn; rather it’s a combination of two factors: 1) laziness and a willingness to ripoff the work of their fellow journos, and 2) the fact that extremely few foreign correspondents based in Tokyo can read or speak Japanese so they have trouble coming up with good feature stories on their own.
I remember a few years ago the BBC did a story on an ear-cleaning clinic in Shinjuku where they used an endoscope so customers could see the insides of their ears as they were being cleaned. A few weeks later the same story showed up in Reuters and then in the IHT. Basically, the guys working for Reuters and the IHT saw the BBC story and thought “oooh, that looks like a good story, I’ll do that too.”
When I was in Russia in the mid-1990s it was even more apparent that lazy reporters who couldn’t speak Russian and who couldn’t dig up stories on their own would blatantly steal story ideas from the published work of their colleagues. Of course, nobody saw it as stealing. If you wrote for a Moscow bureau other reporters for other papers weren’t your enemies, they were your friends. If you worked for Reuters every time the London Independent did a feature story somewhere, well, there was a feature story you could do, too – even with the same interview subjects. And once you did your story, the guy down the hall from Newsweek could do the same story…at which point it could be handed off to the guy from the FT, and so on and so on with everybody involved doing the absolute bare minimum of actual work.
I’m sure that’s what’s happening here too.
That makes sense. It seems that Time Warner reporters have been plagiarizing from each other here.
Though they say that this person’s DVDs sell well, I find it rather suspicious that they don’t give exactly how many copies they have sold altogether (though I might have overlooked it). His name in kanji (徳田茂男) also gives only 55 results on Google Japan – I would think that a popular AV star would have more results than that, and several of them aren’t even related to porn. I suppose his DVDs might sell well to the particular niche of people into that stuff, but saying it’s a huge trend in AVs is a pretty big exaggeration. Like James said, it’s minor at best.
haha, who has the old people fetish now, cnn?!
This person, CNN’s Kyung Lar, reported a “Butler’s Cafe” (White Men Cafe) in Tokyo several weeks ago. I remember that because it was in the middle of the Mainichi controversy. For some reason she seems to be committed to report bizarre stories of Japan.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eit_AI2efNs
I was going to point that out as well. Is this the kind of material CNN is pushing for?
Every story I’ve seen from her has first appeared on this site, from the eMobile ad to the butler cafe and now this. I wonder what’s next! I simply cannot stand her anymore.. if there ever were a line between stupidity and ignorance, she’s blurring it.
Go to “Tube8.com” or “YouPorn.com” and you will easily find the American porn videos starring the elderly.
Why the leading U.S. media are obsessed with the Japanese porn?
Biography of Kyung Lah
http://www.asianamerican.net/bios/Lah-Kyung.html
Does her birthplace have something to do with the way she picks up the topics?
Ponta, did you hear that the Koreans are responsible for Global Warming, and that corn on your big toe? So rude!
Sorry, I am not making the claim. You are.
BTW some of Korean American attitude toward Japan are notorious. If you are not familiar, go to The Marmot’s Hole, you’ll be absolutely shocked. Let’s keep track of her to see if she is one of them and parcivale’s theory is correct.
ponta,
you seem to be out of touch with reality. how many korean americans have you personally met that support your claim?
I don’t see the point of your question.
What if my answer is every Korean Americans I met support my claim?
Even if that is the case, it does not follow every Korean American
is like that. (Actually some Korean Americans are very intelligent and fair) But looking the comments on the English blog-sphere, it is a fact that many Korean Americans hold negative attitudes toward Japan and explicitly express so, so much so that they are notorious for that.
what I am saying is that if you have any doubts, just go to read The Marmot Hole, you will be astonished they use the racial slur about the Japanese and say nasty things about Japan, as a matter of fact.
Yes, the fact that she’s non-Japanese does affect her reporting since pretty much all foreigners (at least those from industrialized countries) seem to want to think of Japas as some kind of wacky wonderland.
Ponta, you’re forgetting the part about how she was publicly fired from KNBC in Chicago for “gross misconduct” after getting caught having an affair with a married field producer while she was also married. She’s divorced now.
She probably realizes that its attention-getting “wai wai” features pieces that will get her airtime. Remember Atika Shubert? Kyung Lah has already got more stories to air in 6 months than she did in 3 years.
KNBC is Los Angeles not Chicago. WMAQ is the NBC affiliate in Chicago…
Hmmm, interesting, I didn’t know. coupled with your comment at 17:45:29, and her biography surely tells something about the way she picks up the topics.
Ho Hum… another “look at wacky Japan” story. Not worth blogging about.
NEXT!
Wacky stories are popular around the globe and sure fire sellers. I imagine this is why she covers them – not any great conspiracy but market demands.
One of the free commuter tabloids in Sydney has pages devoted to them. The breakdown of the wacky stories by country of origin roughly have the US as the number one source by a large margin, then the UK, then Europe as a whole, China, Japan and other assorted countries. It’s mainly by ease of finding the stories in english rather then anything else.
What is interesting is the idea that someone’s origin means they must have a personal agenda for their work and all the research done by ponta to prove this – which says more about them then Kyung Lar. The only personal agenda I’m seeing here belongs to ponta.
I am not saying that her birthplace must mean she has a personal agenda.
I am suggesting it might be the case her choice of topics reflects her ethnicity and let’s keep track of her story to check if parcivale’s theory and my observation is correct.
What is interesting is the idea that I must have an personal agenda by the comments. Frankly the persist denial to my innocent suggestion made me raise suspect if my theory is right.
Even the Daily Show made fun of this one.