不值得說是雜誌

“你要編這種風花雪月的男主角，你要找一個像一個人，這種人根本演起來一點都不像。”

-黃睿靜

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKVYX5-xlOo

I'm a big fan of this story, and love 黃睿靜 for coming out and saying what everyone else is saying, "Look at this guy. You really think this is a guy who's sneaking around with prostitutes?"

There's journalistic integrity, and then there's just plain silliness. If you're going to try to pin a prostie story on Chen Zhizhong, you better get some pictures. I can only imagine an editor hearing this story:

"So, we caught Chen Zhizhong with a prostitute."
"The dorky one with the glasses?"
"Yea, yeah, the ex-president's son."
"You think he gets prostitutes? Have you seen him? Are you sure it wasn't someone else?"
"No, it was totally him."
"Let me see the pictures."
"No pictures."
"No pictures?"
"Naw, we missed him."
"No one's going to believe this fucking story."
"Eh, run with it anyway, it'll sell a lot of copies regardless."
“Good point."

I struggled at first with what she said about magazines, saying 不值得說是雜誌, but then I thought about it, and I guess things like the national enquirer would fall so below the standards of "newspapers" that we'd talk about them exclusively as tabloids, and not as "newspapers." I don't think the same scale exists for magazines. I don't look at People magazine and say, ok, still a magazine, and then get to US weekly and think, "nearing non-magazine threshold", and arrive at something really weak, I don't know, what's the print version of gawker?, and think, "nope, now it's a tabloid." I guess the word "magazine" has so little cachet for me (and the language at large) that it's perhaps impossible to debase a product such that it no longer is worthy of the appellation.