My Life as a Fabricator by Somaly Mam

Here is a brief section from the recently released "as told to," Somaly Mam: My Life as a Fabricator, soon to be a major motion picture. “Even my claim that I unionized all the sex workers and then went on to steal from the pension fund was a fabrication. And now everyone has read Melissa Gira Grant’s Times Op-Ed piece, “The Price of a Sex-Slave Rescue Fantasy,” NYT, 5/29/14)  Ms. Grant said that, 'A Newsweek cover story last week found inconsistencies and flat-out fraud in Ms. Mam’s story of being abducted and forced to work in a brothel as a child-- instead, former neighbors said she came to their village with her parents and graduated from high school, later sitting for a teacher’s exam—and in the stories of women she said she had rescued by the thousands. Ms. Mam even said traffickers had kidnapped her teenage daughter—but the girl’s father said she ran away with her boyfriend.’ Why would I perpetuate such inaccuracies which as Ms. Grant goes on to point out caused even further hardships for those who actually suffered the maladies my foundation had set out to address?  The answer is quite simple. I’m one of the people who had seen the Kony 2012 video on You Tube about The Lord’s Resistance Army. The video was loaded with distortions. But it demonstrated how the ends can justify the means. That video got over 99 million hits. If Jason Russell, the flaky maker of the film, could do it so could I. In addition I wanted to be a bestselling author and if you think it’s difficult to sell books in the United States, you can imagine what it’s like in Pnomh Penh. Do you think for one minute anyone was going to buy a fictionalized account of sex slavery, when you could see the real thing on every street corner? Well, at the end of the day, I’ve concluded that what I did is not so bad. Look at Newsweek. They were the ones who got the goods on me, but everyone knows what they’re after. The magazine just restarted its print edition and the new investors who bringing it back to life are simply trying to scoop their old rival, Time.”

Medical Malpractioner

With the decline of print journalism, magazines have been folding right and left. The demise of the print edition of Newsweek and New York’s Magazine’s decision to become a biweekly are two of the most recent examples of how once auspicious organs have been threatened. But though there has been talk of  bringing a print edition of Newsweek back, the future of glossies may lie in narrowcasting. For instance, instead of Playboy, you would have a magazine called Medical Malpractitoner. Some of the future articles might include “I Saw the Queen in Stirrups” (a royal gynecologist tells all). “Creative Implanting” (a look at common household ingredients that can be used in place of silicone), “Tales of a Dyslexic Brain Surgeon,” “Hip Hip Hooray…Hip Replacements That Are As Easy as ABC,” “I Helped Athletes to Shrink Their Balls: A Doctor’s Reminisces About Steroids,” “A Prominent Oncologist Warns That Cancer like Alcoholism Should be Self-Diagnosed” and “New Frontiers in Lay Dentistry.” The first issue of Medical Malpractioner would hit the stands with an excerpt from the hot new Swedish detective novel, The Girl With the Taboo Tattoo and of course every issue would include a Medical Malpractioner centerfold which would be some cockamamie new piece of equipment along with a nude.

The Daily Planet

The announcement that AOL has acquired The Huffington Post falls on the heels of the merger of Newsweek and The Daily Beast. So a new formula is emerging. Take a moribund media enterprise (AOL, Newsweek) and unite forces with a mordant one and you have … what? In chemistry by definition it's well nigh impossible to create compounds with inert substances, so presumably neither AOL nor Newsweek are deemed to be inert, though previously both were looked at as dying businesses whose major markets were a far cry from the 25-35 demographic most advertisers crave. A good part of AOL’s business is still the dial-up crowd of assisted livers, and Newsweek is most likely found in the reception area of gerontology offices. However, to invoke another rule of science, if two negatives make a positive, what about a negative and a faint glimmer of hope? Particularly in the case of the AOL and Huffington Post molecule, there is lots of hope. Right now print journalism is in the dementia stage which precedes the death rattle, and many of those who have foresworn their Times subscriptions have been left to fend for themselves in the anarchy of the blogosphere, where subjective perceptions by unlicensed mental health practitioners define the quality of news analysis. Something had to give, both in terms of the product produced and who was producing it. When the dust settles, the grand old newspapers of the past are bound to be replaced by a new journalism with its own technologies and mythologies. Perhaps these two mergers are harbingers of change.