The magazine which incurred the Lees’ wrath was a venerable one. Founded in 1946, FEER had long enjoyed a reputation for rigorous, intelligent reporting on Asian politics. At its height, the Review was a weekly journal that employed 77 correspondents throughout Asia. Its reporters were among the journalistic elite. “For someone who grew up dreaming about swashbuckling journalists reporting from far-flung places, there was no greater model than the Far Eastern Economic Review ,” wrote one journalist. ^[2] The article recalled the example of John MacBeth who, writing out of East Timor, Indonesia, continued reporting even after losing a leg to disease. In 1975, FEER’s Nayan Chanda was the last reporter left in the presidential palace in Saigon when North Vietnamese tanks broke through the palace gates and unplugged the telex, cutting Chanda off mid-broadcast. Perhaps most famously, the first interview Cambodian strongman Pol Pot granted from his jungle hide-out was to Nate Thayer, a Review reporter based in Cambodia.

Dow Jones. The publishing behemoth Dow Jones—which also owned the Wall Street Journal (which published an Asian as well as a European edition), Barron’s , the Dow Jones Newswires, and numerous other properties—had first acquired a 40 percent stake in FEER in 1973. It bought the Hong Kong-based journal outright in 1987. But the journal did not fare well in the 1990s.

In 2004, unable to recuperate from the twin shocks of the dot-com implosion and the Asian financial crisis of 1997 that significantly dented advertising revenues for publications in the region, FEER revamped its format, and significantly cut back its operations. Instead of a reported weekly, it became a monthly journal of ideas, with articles contributed by freelance academics and businessmen.

The Review ’s staff shrank from over 80 to two full-time editors, a secretary, and an intern. The Review published on the third Friday of every month (except August and September), ran about 80 pages long, and had a circulation base of 15,000 in Asia and the US. ^[3] It also operated a website, feer.com. In conjunction with the 2004 changes, former Editor-in-chief David Plott left the magazine and Restall—a former editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal —took over.