The news in Cambodia gets more dispiriting every day

As a former traditional print journalist, I cannot leave behind the urge to keep up with the news.  Consequently, I read online or on actual paper the three slim dailies published in English, presumably for expats.  

The Khmer Times, which I confess has shown modest improvement since its plagiarism scandal several months ago, is the one in which I have the least faith in having achieved an acceptable journalistic standard.  Rather, I tend to rely on the Cambodian Daily and the Phnom Penh Post, which do a pretty good job of reporting the news.

What I see virtually every day is stories about political corruption, traffic deaths, human rights abuses, sexual abuse, governmental misconduct and an extraordinarily high level of judicial malfeasance that boggles my mind.

Khmer Times unapologetically commits plagiarism

There were numerous reasons that I declined to work at the Khmer Times on three occasions starting more than a year ago.

One was how much I have come to value my free time.

The other reasons were more complicated.  For one thing, I had a viscerally negative reaction to

In Cambodia, dealing with refugees remains hot issue

Sitting left to right, Jim Brooke, Phay Siphan, Denise Coghlin, Billy Tai.

During a panel discussion last week, four individuals failed as expected to arrive at unanimous agreement about the world’s refugees in general and, in particular, the four who have arrived in Cambodia from Australia.

Former New York Times journalist, Jim Brooke, a friend who is editor of the year-old Khmer Times newspaper, stuck to the theme of a column in which he denigrated the men, women and children who braved the perils of crossing the high seas to enter Australia from distant shores.

Those souls have made it only to the independent nation of Nauru, where some 1,000 of them are held in a detention center run by Australia in what are described as deplorable conditions akin to a concentration camp’s.

Saying that Australia has the fifth highest per capital income in the world, Brooke characterized the migrants as