Malaysia's miserable media

Malaysia’s mendacious ‘mainstream’ media must hardly know which way to turn these days, as they find themselves trapped in their own credibility gap.

They are increasingly despised and deserted by audiences disgusted with their lying and dissembling on behalf of their Barisan Nasional masters, and now blamed by BN itself for failing in their mission to keep the public properly brainwashed.

According to Bernama, the BN mouthpiece ‘news’ agency, Information, Communication and Culture Minister Rais Yatim has complained that private TV and radio stations had “failed to deliver the government’s aspirations resulting in BN’s poor performance at the general elections last year”.

“There are stations that do not carry messages good for nation-building,” he added.

What Rais actually means by “nation-building”, of course, is actually ‘notion-building’: the construction and perpetuation of the notion that what’s good for BN is good for Malaysia.

And what he has clearly failed to realise is the fact that - as he conceded later in the same interview - “the media had been very helpful to BN over the years”is the very reason the formerly gullible populace has become so incredulous and outright cynical.

More meat for the cynics, or at least this one, was his remark that he would be "looking at the role of television and radio stations in nation-building. There are 34 radio stations under the government”.

This reminded me of another information minister, Josef Goebbels, who famously remarked that "I consider radio to be the most modern and the most crucial instrument for influencing the masses.."

Apparently holding a similar belief in the propaganda power of air media, the potency of TV having surpassed even that of radio since Goebbels’ time, is Malaysia’s Media Prima.

Still fighting the good fight on BN’s behalf with its recent ban of mention or images of Abdul Razak Baginda, acquitted conspiracy suspect in the Altantuya Shaariibuu murder, or mention of Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak or his wife, Rosmah Mansor, in connection with the case.

As Malaysiakini reported, DAP secretary-general and Penang Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng rightly commented on this blatant act of self-censorship as “against the principles of basic journalism that espouses freedom of the press, freedom of information, the freedom of access to information, freedom from censorship, freedom of expression and right of reply”.

Tame ‘journalists’

It also seems to me to be in contravention of the spirit of the recent speech by the prime minister at the MPI Press Awards, in which he said that Malaysia needs “vibrant, free, informed media... empowered to responsibly report what they saw, without fear of consequences...”

But I recall that in a column I wrote at the time I called this speech “incredible”. In fact the current and previous prime ministers have so often promised press freedom, or claimed that Malaysia already enjoys this priceless liberty, that they remind me of another of the aforesaid Goebbels’ famous remarks.

I’ve referred to it before, but it deserves another airing:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the state can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie.

It thus becomes vitally important for the state to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the state.”

Certainly truth is treated like the greatest enemy of the BN state. And it retains hundreds if not thousands of tame ‘journalists’ whose job is to ensure that the truth never sees the light of day.

Not that my criticising these harlots posing as newshounds will ever make a jot of difference to their dedication to deception.

But in case I can persuade a few more of their victims to stop swallowing their lies, and with apologies to the already converted who are sick of my going on about press freedom and how journalists are supposed to behave, here are some words far worthier of repetition than my own:

• The press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood. - Thomas Jefferson

• The free press is the mother of all our liberties and of our progress under liberty. - Adlai Stevenson

• Freedom of conscience, of education, of speech, of assembly are among the very fundamentals of democracy and all of them would be nullified should freedom of the press ever be successfully challenged. - Franklin D Roosevelt

• If you don't have this freedom of the press, then all these little fellows are weaseling around and doing their monkey business and they never get caught. - Harold R Medina

• Journalists must seek and speak the truth, for we are the voice of the voiceless millions. - Razia Bhatti

• An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and the courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. - Joseph Pulitzer (right)

And finally an assessment by Thomas Jefferson in 1814 of the state of US newspapers of the time, but which applies amazingly well to the Malaysian mainstream media today:

"I deplore... the putrid state into which our newspapers have passed and the malignity, the vulgarity, and mendacious spirit of those who write for them...

“These ordures are rapidly depraving the public taste and lessening its relish for sound food. As vehicles of information and a curb on our functionaries, they have rendered themselves useless by forfeiting all title to belief... This has, in a great degree, been produced by the violence and malignity of party spirit."