To me, the hole in the Dean's logic is rather apparent. I'm refering to an editorial written by Prof Ang, Dean of the School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University.
In his article regarding training for bloggers, he wrote :
The importance of training was brought home to me in a recent research project done by a colleague in the Philippines. The Philippines has one of the most free press systems in the world; but by some reckoning, it is the second most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist, second only to Iraq.
In her research, she found that 90 per cent of the journalists killed had no training in journalism whatsoever. In many of the cases, they were radio journalists who so defamed, harangued and harassed their news subjects that these people felt that they had no recourse other than violence.
Had the journalists been trained, they would probably have known to what legal limits they could go. In other words, without intending to trivialise or condone the violence, 90 per cent of the murders of journalists could have been averted with proper training.
I see it as an issue of confusing cause and effect. Prof Ang reckons that if these journalists had been trained, they would not have crossed the legal limits of defamation and slander therefore... they would not have been killed. So he reckons the cause of the murders is that the journalists were not trained.
If we apply that same logic to say, public speaking, and imagine a person who casually implies that a key political leader is corrupt (a potential cause for defamation), does that mean that the speaker will likely be killed ?
In my opinion, if someone is going to kill a speaker for saying something they don't like, the problem isn't training the speaker, but a whole mess of other issues instead, such as a poor justice system, warped social norms, or a generally high crime rate.
Even within legal limits, it's very easy to step on someone else's toes.
Sorry about the rant. I just feel that Prof Ang got it wrong, and I'm inclined to question his motivations regarding training considering that he's leading a workshop on the very issue.
