The name and face of Edwin Maher will have been very familiar to Australian TV viewers. He was the ABC's very popular weatherman.
Then he retired a while back......and has now resurfaced on TV in China - with controversy in its wake. The LA Times explains:
"Edwin Maher was having a "Broadcast News" moment, feeling a flicker of self-doubt, an attack of the sweats waiting to happen beneath the white-hot studio lights.
The veteran Australian TV reporter and weatherman was starting a new job abroad as a prime-time news anchor. But decades of on-camera presence couldn't prepare him for this gig, mouthing the party line for an imposing state-run TV network with armed soldiers posted at the entrance gates.
He was reading the news in communist China.
"I stared into the lens and mentioned the Communist Party and I almost lost it," he recalled. "It was a routine story about some move the regime was making. But I remember thinking to myself, 'I can't believe I'm doing this.' "
Maher is the first non-Chinese news anchor for state television's English-language station, CCTV International. He speaks almost no Mandarin, but that's of little concern to his bosses.
He was hired in 2003 as the station introduced a Western face to shake its image as a stodgy government mouthpiece, famous among foreigners for its wooden presentations and sometimes-tortured English. Maher anchors the news up to four times a day for millions of viewers worldwide, including the U.S. Critics say Maher isn't a reporter at all, but a shameless government yes-man who gives all Western journalists a bad name. Maher answers bluntly: He says he simply doesn't care.
Maher made his mark as a sort of Aussie Willard Scott, an eccentric weatherman who ad-libbed his reports by using map pointers such as carrots, scepters and an ice cream cone. Maher has given the weather standing upside-down and once poured a cup of water over his head during an Australian heat wave.
He came to China on a whim after his wife died from a brain tumor in 2001. Since then, he's become a minor celebrity who has also written a series of articles for government-run China Daily on his fumbling efforts to learn the language and culture. This year, the illustrated columns have been turned into a book, published in English and Chinese."
Then he retired a while back......and has now resurfaced on TV in China - with controversy in its wake. The LA Times explains:
"Edwin Maher was having a "Broadcast News" moment, feeling a flicker of self-doubt, an attack of the sweats waiting to happen beneath the white-hot studio lights.
The veteran Australian TV reporter and weatherman was starting a new job abroad as a prime-time news anchor. But decades of on-camera presence couldn't prepare him for this gig, mouthing the party line for an imposing state-run TV network with armed soldiers posted at the entrance gates.
He was reading the news in communist China.
"I stared into the lens and mentioned the Communist Party and I almost lost it," he recalled. "It was a routine story about some move the regime was making. But I remember thinking to myself, 'I can't believe I'm doing this.' "
Maher is the first non-Chinese news anchor for state television's English-language station, CCTV International. He speaks almost no Mandarin, but that's of little concern to his bosses.
He was hired in 2003 as the station introduced a Western face to shake its image as a stodgy government mouthpiece, famous among foreigners for its wooden presentations and sometimes-tortured English. Maher anchors the news up to four times a day for millions of viewers worldwide, including the U.S. Critics say Maher isn't a reporter at all, but a shameless government yes-man who gives all Western journalists a bad name. Maher answers bluntly: He says he simply doesn't care.
Maher made his mark as a sort of Aussie Willard Scott, an eccentric weatherman who ad-libbed his reports by using map pointers such as carrots, scepters and an ice cream cone. Maher has given the weather standing upside-down and once poured a cup of water over his head during an Australian heat wave.
He came to China on a whim after his wife died from a brain tumor in 2001. Since then, he's become a minor celebrity who has also written a series of articles for government-run China Daily on his fumbling efforts to learn the language and culture. This year, the illustrated columns have been turned into a book, published in English and Chinese."
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