Eric D. Langager
@EricDavid

I created the Beijing Diary in December of 2003, just prior to leaving the United States for Beijing, China in January of 2004.

The Beijing Diary currently includes the Beijing Diary blog (beijingdiary.blogspot.com), the Beijing Diary podcast (beijingdiay.podbean.com), and the Beijing Diary YouTube channel (YouTube.com/WangChangye).

I was born in Shinjuku, the Manhattan of Tokyo, in the spring of 1954. My parents were Christian missionaries in the countryside of northern Japan, but my mother had hepatitis when I was born, so my father took her to a missionary doctor in Tokyo who ordered her to bed immediately, which turned out to be fortunate, because I was born prematurely while she was in that hospital.

As a child growing up in the “backside” of Japan, I was always interested in finding out what was going on in the world around us. There was no Internet, and no cable television. Our two sources of information (other than getting letters from America) were the Japan Times (English language newspaper) and shortwave radio. I sometimes read articles in the Japan Times (mostly Ripley’s “Believe it or Not”), but my real fascination was radio. I would listen to the Far East Network (armed forces radio), Voice of America, and Radio Moscow by the hour.

My parents took me to America when I was 13 years old, and suddenly we were able to watch television news. At that time, we had three choices: ABC, NBC, and CBS. We also had public television, but I don’t recall watching it that much. That all changed with the development of…..you thought I was going to say the Internet, right? Not the Internet. CNN. That was before the Internet. Ten years before the Internet. Longer than that, actually, because even though I had a laptop and was accessing the Internet in the early nineties, it was mostly email. So the Internet as a source of information didn’t really become prominent until the late nineties.

But getting back to CNN—I will never forget when CNN was launched in 1980. It shocked the world. The idea of a 24 hour news channel took the news world by storm. I should interject here, that when I say “CNN,” I am not talking about the current CNN. CNN pretty much went to the dogs after Ted Turner sold it. The CNN that Ted Turner created was highly respected around the world. I will never forget when the Soviet Union fell. Reporters were standing outside the Soviet embassy in Washington yelling questions at embassy officials who were walking into the embassy. They said, “What’s going on in your country?”

The answer was, “We don’t know.”

“How do you get information?”

“CNN.”

In today’s world, it’s hard to believe that was literally true. Soviet embassy officials actually had to resort to watching CNN to find out what was going on back home.

Social media has transformed information. There is a good side to that. Sometimes very adept writers who are not professional journalists can provide good and useful information. The down side to this is that sometimes information that is not well vetted is published as gospel truth. But in today’s world, the mainstream media has become so dishonest, that bloggers and podcasters are actually needed to provide a whistle blowing function that preserves the right of the people to be informed.

To this end I have tried, with the Beijing Diary, to publish only that which can be clearly ascertained, and to defend my analysis with cogent arguments. You must be the judge of how well I have succeeded.