Would media cover Aung San Suu Kyi if she made cute scones?

News media serve up celebrity circuses as world goes to you-know-where in a handbasket

Date published: 3/12/2005

By RICK MERCIER

DETERMINING WHICH media outlet has provided us the dumbest Martha Stewart coverage would be a prodigious task, but the newspaper in Norfolk would have to be in the running.

In last Saturday's edition, The Virginian-Pilot put the story of Martha's release from prison in a giant feature-page-looking centerpiece package on A1, tying it together with a headline reading "Freedom. A good thing."

Gaudy display copy highlighted "what she missed" ("the idea of cappuccino"), "what she wore" ("an ecru quilted coat and matching knit scarf, dark pants and boots"), and "what she said" ("It was kind of nice to have a rest from the material things").

Maybe I'm not cool enough to appreciate the paper's ironic approach to presenting this story. Perhaps I should have understood that the package's orange backdrop was a way of signaling to readers: "Boy, isn't this a bunch of cheese?"

But even if we assume that the Pilot's editors and designers were just trying to be hip, it's reasonable to ask whether a responsible newspaper should devote much of its front page to Martha's release, no matter how the story is presented.

After all, it's not as if she's the only figure exemplifying strong womanhood who's being kept under house arrest. Way over on the other side of the world, in a place called Burma (or sometimes Myanmar), there's a woman named Aung San Suu Kyi.

She's the rightful leader of her country, but after her pro-democracy party scored a landslide election victory in 1990, the junta running Burma decided it had grown rather fond of having absolute power, so it annulled the election and put Suu Kyi under house arrest. She's been confined to her home most of the time since then.

Suu Kyi thinks freedom is "a good thing," too, and would like to have a little more of it for herself and her people. Once, addressing those of us lucky enough to live in democratic nations, she pleaded, "Please use your freedom to promote ours."

That seems like a fairly modest request--and it's one that should resonate with journalists in free societies. But for too many American media workers, "freedom" is a much cooler concept when it applies to Martha than to the world's most famous political prisoner and 43 million other people somewhere in Asia.

Follow us on

Date published: 3/12/2005