DEAN Interview: Isaac Stone Fish

ON THE NORTH KOREAN BLACK BOX & THE FUTURE OF NEWS MEDIA IN CHINA

A DEAN Interview with Isaac Stone Fish

On March 30th 2014, Isaac Stone Fish, associate editor at Foreign Policy, and sat down with the Duke East Asia Nexus' Fei Gao 高菲 and Shucao Mo 莫书草 in order to discuss, among other things, how he got into the business and his thoughts on the current situation in Asia. The interview went on to cover the direction news media will be forced to take in the post-Bloomberg & visa crisis China, and the best way to gain a scope on North Korea.

Fei: What is a good feed for information on North Korea? Because it’s such a black box, no one really knows about it, and we don’t get that much coverage or information.

Isaac: That’s a good question. So, just to reiterate what you said, North Korea is an extremely difficult place to understand, and anyone who says that they understand North Korea either knows something we all don’t or is probably just wrong. So I think more generally speaking the best way to read news about North Korea is with a huge grain of salt: to try determine where the writer of the article gets their information and who is saying what and just kind of reading it especially carefully. I get most of my information on North Korea on Twitter by following a lot of people who talk about North Korea, but that certainly that is not the easiest way to do it. You just have to look around and see who is saying smart things, follow them, and build up a feed. In terms of news sources, the best things I’ve read about North Korea have been Barbara Demick’s book Nothing to Envy. She’s a [Los Angeles] Times reporter. She writes a lot of really good stuff on North Korea. There’s also Adam Johnson’s book The Orphan Master’s Son; even though it’s fictional, it’s really useful to understanding the way in which North Koreans may be thinking about things. There’s another book called Escape From Camp 14 by Blaine Harden, which interviews the only known escapee from a North Korea concentration camp.

Fei: What are the backgrounds of the people who you are following about North Korea on Twitter? Are they currently in North Korea or have they studied it academically?

Isaac: Most of them aren’t in North Korea. There’s a very, very small community of expats who live there. There’s a photographer from the [Associated Press] named David Guttenfelder who tweets a lot of really good photos from North Korea. And the AP has a bureau there, so they’ll also provide valuable information about what is going on. A lot of [the people I follow on Twitter] are journalists who cover North Korea or activists who work in organizations that help smuggle North Korean to South Korea, and try to shine light on North Korean human rights abuses. It’s a pretty wide mix of people as well as just generally people who Tweet about China or Asian affairs.

Shucao: How did you become interested in journalism?

Isaac: I became interested in China in high school. I just wanted to experience something different from Syracuse, New York, the culture that I grew up in, and China was as far away as I could possibly get. So I spent the summer after my junior year in high school in Xinjiang and the next year in Tibet through a program called Where There Be Dragons. It was a program for high school students to tromp around China. So I did that over summer 2001-2002, I think, and I got hooked, so I studied Chinese in college and moved to China right after graduation. But I was interested in writing before any of this. I got into journalism because I thought it was a really good to way to get to talk and engage with people and to write, and I think there’s so many great stories in China, and I want to be part of telling them.

Fei: Do you see yourself using other forms of journalism such as media, documentary, and such, or are you mainly focused on writing articles?

Isaac: I focus mainly on articles, but also at Foreign Policy (FP) we have other multimedia examples. We did have a graph that we did that we took from Chinese media about Zhou Yongkang (周永康). Personally I’m a words guy, but [Foreign Policy] does visuals as well.

Shucao: How would you characterize the Western media’s coverage on China in general, and how do you see the American coverage of China differing from other countries?

Isaac: It’s hard to say because I don’t follow American media coverage of places like Germany or Norway that closely. I think one of the big differences between American media coverage of China and other places is that if, say you’re an American journalist in Germany: the German press is already going to be hard-hitting and breaking a lot of stories. That’s less the case in China because of government constraints and censorship. So I think the American media in China has a bigger responsibility because they’re telling more stories. I think there’s a lot of opportunities, because you’re reporting on something that’s not getting reported on elsewhere in English, Chinese, or any other language, so there’s really a vast amount of materials one can use.

Shucao: What are the biggest issues you would watch for in from China in the next year?

Isaac: Well, first off, [news] media is going through an interesting time at the moment as people are trying to figure out what the new business model is. So I think there may be a lot of change in media in the next few years. To be more specific, there’s a lot of controversy now with Bloomberg after the thing happened in November where the Editor-in-Chief allegedly killed a story on Wang Jianlin (王健林), head of Dalian Wanda Group (大連萬達) where one of their top officials said they had to be careful reporting in China because of the business relationship. So I think as China becomes more and more important to companies’ bottom lines, media companies are trying to find ways to maintain their credibility while covering China. Bloomberg still does a great job covering China, but it’ll be interesting to see how many more visa problems places like Bloomberg will have in the coming years and if that was just a brief tightening of tension or if it will be eventually become harder for foreign reporters in general. That said, it’s much easier for foreigner reporters to operate in China than Chinese reporters. Having a foreign passport acts as a shield, and they have so much more leeway and are so much more protected than Chinese journalists.

Fei: There also seems to be a controversy of self-censorship over the visa problems as well. Some say that it’s not a problem and people don’t self censor and others think it is a problem. What is your take?

Isaac: That’s a good question. As new organizations, it is our responsibility to publish stories that we feel really add value and investigate what’s happening in China and that we don’t curtail because we’re afraid it’s going to limit our access. So I think people just should do the best they can. I don’t want to be too vague about that. A lot of it [comes down to the] individual, and I’m kind of hoping that journalists that are working over there do the best they can to get the really important information out there.

Fei: Where do you see the future for Foreign Policy? Do you have any specific goals for the future for the magazine? What kind of niche do you hope to fill?

Isaac: I can only speak to this as an Asia editor for the Asian section of the magazine, but I think we realize the importance of China, and we really do feel like there’s not enough China coverage. So we are going to keep trying to expand our China coverage and provide as much information on it as we can - hopefully not because of some big, terrible news event, but I do think American news interest in China will keep growing. So basically quantity and quality. More innovative ways we can tell stories, whether it’s through visuals or people on the ground, or deeply reported investigative pieces. We just want to keep bringing information back that might enlighten and enrich our readers and find things people find worthy reading.

Shucao: What kind of journalistic need do you see FP filling? To what kind of audience is FP addressed?

Isaac: So just speaking as Asia editor and speaking from my little area, I think we fill a need for people who want to understand the intersection of politics, economics, and ideas. We have three different [types] of readers. The first are just readers who are curious about what is going on in the world. The second is the business audience that needs to know what’s happening in the world because it affects their jobs. And the third is the D.C./NGO/governmental kind of audience. As a news organization - and I think every news organization does this [to some extent] - we try not to say we want to do a story just because this section of readers is really interested in it. Rather, we say here’s something we find valuable and deserves to be covered, and then we try to put that out there.

Fei: I also have a question about social media; you mentioned in your [China Leadership Summit] lecture how state-controlled, centralized media is no longer as dominant as it used to be. With more social media like Weibo微博and Weixin微信, people get their information from other avenues instead of CCTV (China Central Television) 北京電視台. What is your take on where this decentralization of information sources is going and how might it affect the Chinese public?

Isaac: This is a much better question for David [Wertime] to answer, but I’ll take a quick stab at it: I think Chinese media is going to evolve top-down rather than bottom-up. I think any sort of tightening down or opening up of the media is going to be dictated by the top-brass and maybe sometimes they might think, “we do need to open the valves a little bit and we think this will be a great way to release pressure”, or alternatively they might feel under threat and need to rein things in more. [The way they chose is] either going to drive and allow independent media to flourish and grow on the sidelines, or it’s going to snuff them out. So I don’t think I’m optimistic or pessimistic about what’s going to happen. I think it’s really a political story, as things evolve and the more comfortable Xi Jinping is with his hold on power, the more he will allow space for dissent to flourish, but when he feels besieged, things will get tighter. But it’s impossible to guess what’s going on in his mind.

Shucao: What is your next professional step?

Isaac: I have no plans than to do other than what I’m doing now. I want to do what I’m doing now, better than I’m doing it now. With editing, a lot of my time is just trying to broaden our coverage or trying to find enriching pieces for people to read. And O really enjoy reporting and writing, so the more often I can do that, the better.

Fei: How often do you go back to China?

Isaac: I’ve only been gone for a little over two years. I’ve gone back about once or twice a year, so I’ll probably keep that pace. I’d like to go back more. You kind of realize there are a lot of things that you take for granted when you’re living there, that you kind of forget being away. It would be good for my Chinese if I spent more time there.

Shucao: I saw that the piece that you wrote with my friend Helen Gao; do you see yourself training blossoming Chinese writers?

Isaac: Helen is extremely talented and doesn’t need help from us. But the more we can work with young Chinese voices the better. Helen is a great example and David works a lot with Yueran [Zhang]. One thing that David and I trying to do and one of the advantages of speaking some Mandarin is trying to get more Chinese voices in our publication, whether that means Chinese people writing more stories or interviewing more [Chinese] people, we think that’s really valuable.

Fei: I see a question about Kim Jong Un’s haircut. Did you see that one?

Isaac: So...that story is probably not true, but there was a story that broke last week that Kim Jong Un ordered everyone to get the same haircut. Sources are usually pretty limited so I don’t remember the sources for that but I think it’s a few anonymous sources. So it’s impossible to know; you can’t just call Kim Jong Un up or his spoke person and ask them.

Transcription: Emily Feng and Tenzing Thondup