John Beasley, actor. Other credits include “The Sum of All Fears”, “The Pretender”, and “To Sir, with Love II”.
Lawrence sent over an obit for Claudia Rosett, journalist and Adjunct Fellow at the Hudson Institute.
Highlights of her journalism career include exposing the Oil-for-Food corruption scandal at the United Nations; covering the Russian invasion of Chechnya; and monitoring Beijing’s abrogation of its one-country, two-systems promise on Hong Kong. Her short book, What to Do About the UN, argues that the international organization founded in 1945 as a vehicle to avert war and promote human freedom and dignity has instead become fraught with bigotry, fraud, abuse, and corruption.
One of her most memorable pieces of reporting took place on June 4, 1989, when she was present in Tiananmen Square as Chinese tanks rolled over unarmed, peaceful student protestors. In an article published in the Wall Street Journal the next day, she wrote, “With this slaughter, China’s communist government has uncloaked itself before the world.” Thirty-four years later, these words still ring true.
NYT obit for Brian Shul (archived).
It seems as if Claudia Rosett was a very busy lady. I was aware of pretty much all of these things that she was monitoring while they were going on, and they were at times ignored by many in the mainstream press, in favor of attacking or advancing other political issues or parties.
Of course with the Tiananmen Square protests there was no hiding that from the world, and it seemed as if the students were going to actually win. At first. But that was premature thinking and perhaps merely wishful thinking at best. We need to always remember, back then, and especially perhaps now, that the CCP of today and the China of 1989 are the same nation that they were in the time of Chairman Mao. And they may wish to hide their oppression and murder of their own people, but do not make the mistake again that we did during the student uprising. The are a brutal and ruthless dictatorship, and they always will be. If they have to run over a bunch of students with tanks to get them to stop their protests and leave the area, then that is what they will do.
Her writing about the U.N. is spot on, and the U.N. continues to get more corrupt the longer they last. There are some things that the U.N. does well, such as distribute food, but that is also one of the things that they do poorly. Go figure.
With China and Hong Kong, gee whiz, who would have thought that China would interfere with the extremely wealthy, tiny nation of Hong Kong running it’s own affairs, once it became a part of a China that constantly struggles to feed the people who don’t live in the cities? Probably only everyone who has a brain that thought about the nation returning to Chinese rule.
It is a shame when I see truly talented and in some ways brave journalists like this pass away. We do not have that many of them left from the glory days of the past, when young men and women went to college to become journalists with that goal of actually making this type of a difference, of covering the stories that matter, in a way that holds the feet to the fire of those who would rather be hidden. I know that many of the names of the past also have their feet of clay, but they did some good as well, people like Dan Rather, Brit Hume, Hugh Downs, Peter Jennings, Ted Koppel, Diane Sawyer, and Soledad Obrien.
It seems that now the liberalism has so permeated the role of the journalist along with the requirement to be first, with being right a distant second, that I along with many others, get my news from sources other than journalists. And they wonder why newspapers can no longer support 7 day a week printings. My city only prints 3 days a week plus a Sunday printing. They charge $3 per weekday, and $5 on Sunday, and the paper has gotten so small that it is no longer worth bothering with. I get the relevant information online, such as the obits or sports news. I know much of it is not the news corporations blame, with the 24/7 news cycle, and the information age of the internet, but they have also contributed to their own demise by running a bad business model.
In any case, thanks for Ms. Rosett’s obit, it spurred me to complain, which I often do. But it also made me think, which I don’t do enough. Here in my west coast of Michigan, we are having the hottest summer since I left my steel melt shop, with 90 degrees being the normal high for the past couple of days and expected for a few more, with no rain in sight. I don’t mind the heat, spending over 35 years in a place where the floor temp often exceeded 150 degrees in the summer. My wife hates it though. She is a winter person, who get S.A.D. disease in the summer. Seasonal Affective Disorder, which is usually reserved for those who get depression due to lack of sunlight in the winter. If she could live in Alaska half the year, she would love it. If I could live in the south for half the year, I would love it. So we compromise, and stay in Michigan, where we can get all of the weather of both places, in the same day at times.