Birth pain of a new media?

A Letter By : Sim Kwang Yang via M'Kini


The sort of cathartic change in our national life like the general election result on March 8 is bound to subvert and implode many of the institutions that have been frozen frigid by the architectonic gridlock of past totalitarianism. One such institution is the media.

Overnight, many of the premises and assumptions about the functions of and roles of the media long held to be gospel truth by practitioners and information consumers alike have been proven to be downright false. The new political landscape the morning after must have compelled many politicians and journalists to rethink orthodox media policy and practices. Certainly, they have discovered with shock and awe the power of the small narratives swamping the marginal alternative media in Malaysia. The cyber world of the internet has come of age.

The prime Minister has openly admitted that the Barisan National's biggest mistake was to underestimate the power of the internet. I too was equally guilty. I had thought that the number of people with internet connections was still limited. Certainly the all-important rural voters had no easy access to the cyber world, and so the internet could not have created any critical impact on the voting trend.
But alas, during the campaign period, Malaysiakini became the hottest net portal for voters hungry for election news. The traffic was so heavy that you had to wait a long time to gain access. I was told that during the entire period, Malaysiakini enjoyed 200,000 unique hits daily, making it the most popular source of election information in Malaysia.

The traffic was so heavy that the Malaysiakini management had to find RM250.000 to install a new server that could handle the exponential increase in demand for alternative news and comments!

On polling day, the virtual traffic at Malaysiakini was even worse than the real traffic jam on the streets of Kuala Lumpur at peak hours. They had hourly update on the election results, and visitors would have known that Penang had fallen to the opposition early in the evening on March 8. In sharp contrast, the mainstream media were still quite opaque and nothing conclusive could be gleamed from them even as late as 4 o'clock the next morning!

Let Malaysiakini grow and prosper

A friend opined that the ten year existence of Malaysiakini has had something to do with the political tsunami that swept Peninsular Malaysia. I dare say they had indeed a very big part in changing the way Malaysians search for what they consider to be credible news and commentary.

Now, I hope millions of Malaysians will subscribe to this electronic newspaper, so they can start to make some money, grow, and expand the scope and the quality of their news coverage. Hopefully, they will be listed on the KLSE one day, and columnists like me will be paid professional fees for a change.

As one commentator on Astro Awani Channel 501 noted, every Kelantan household would have at least a son or a daughter working in the Klang valley, where internet cafes are everywhere at RM2 or less per hour. Some of these Kelantanese Diasporas in KL use the internet to talk to their loved ones back home in their kampong.

They also have access to the general chat that saturates Malaysia's cyberspace. Some of them would download and print political stuff from Malaysiakini and numerous blogs and websites, and send them back to the kampong. This way, the explosive undercurrents of urban discontent also filter back to the rural heartland!
Add to these alternative channels of communication young Malaysians' epidemic addiction to the mobile telephone, and their whirlwind love affair with sending SMS messages, you get an awesome electronic network for the purpose of political campaign far away from the intelligence-gathering machinery of the ruling BN coalition.

When interviewed on an Astro Awani political talk show, a prominent Umno minister expressed dismay at why voters would rather seek out and believe in what he considered to be false and libellous information on the internet, instead of following the "truth" on the prime media, the media Perdana.

Like many prominent politicians in government, this Umno leader is still living in the time capsule of the past, and insisting on wallowing in his denial syndrome. He is talking the old language of social engineering and mind control. He, like all BN leaders and strategists, has fallen victims to the lies propagated through the mainstream media before and during the campaign period.

If you had followed the elections through the government and government controlled television stations and newspapers, you would have thought that the opposition parties did not exist. If they did, they were mostly a motley bunch of riotous bandits bent on destroying law and order.

According to the mainstream media again, you are harangued day in and day out by mystical leaders with giant halo around their noble head on how Malaysia has become paradise on earth because of them. You are given all kinds of statistics and facts on all the glorious development programmes drawn up for grateful citizens. You are shown daily scenes of rapturous crowds of supporters surrounding these living saints with titles as long as your arm. You get the impression that they are walking on water.

The election results put paid to the lies being paraded as hard news on TV. Obviously about half of the Malaysian population of all races up and down the peninsula did not believe what they saw on TV and what they read in the papers. They were mot duped because their daily lived experience told a different story of suffocating inflation, crimes, corruption in high and low places, and insufferable hardship at just making ends meet.

Why, there may be those who – like me – have to repress an urge to vomit whenever they watch television news at 8 pm every night.

The farce that disguised itself as mainstream news did fool some people. It fooled their political masters into thinking that they would cruise comfortably to their two-third majority in parliament, and state power in all states with the possible exception of Kelantan. It fooled them into believing in their invincibility, their comfortable eternal divine right to rule Malaysia, despite their corruption and failing.

Then, on the morning after the poll, they were shocked out of their skulls by the change of the political sky over Malaysia. That sense of disbelief is the symptom of their extreme complacency and vacuous arrogance.

Thoughtful voices

And then, the question is: what now?

The BN coalition can continue their business as before, and use the media as a propaganda machine towards their political end. They can continue to manufacture tenuous untruth, pass it off as news, and believe in it themselves. Then, four or five more years from now or during another general election in the foreseeable future, the voters will speak out again against this cynical conspiracy. Then, the UMNO president will become the opposition leader in parliament. How I look forward to that glorious day!

Already, there are thoughtful voices within the deep bowel of the ruling classes bubbling feebly to the surface, expressing disquiet and wondering whether the media game ought not to be reformed.

All of a sudden, I begin to read the column by my old friend Wong Chun Wai in the Star again. In a series of articles, he asks for the media to consider their problem of credibility, or the lack of it. He even proposed that the Malaysian government TV stations be reengineered after the fashion of the BBC, which is publicly funded, but which has remained independent and critical through many past decades.

Wong's confidence is based on his knowledge of the new Information Minister Ahmad Shabery Chik. I too knew this new minister personally when he was with Semangat 46, and we had to work together for the two-coalition project that failed in 1990.
This new man is certainly a century ahead of his fossilised predecessor who lost in the elections. But radical political change is more than about personality merely. You have to examine the historical forces at work.

Can this new Information Minister overcome the kind of primitive monolithic Neanderthal culture that has pervaded the ideology and practice of Umno in the political arena? With Umno caught up in the kind of self-incriminating strife in the way of a snake swallowing its own tail – and relishing the taste, can this dominant political force in Malaysia for half a century think outside the racial box and find the resolve and innovativeness to reinvent its identity and purpose? My knee-jerk reaction is a resounding 'No!"

Meanwhile, let the prime media fumble clumsily as they do, trying to cope with the new reality. People like me still have the burgeoning alternative media, to explore the power and the possibility of freedom of expression, and to use these new channels to enrich the political narration in our beloved, though much flawed, homeland.

Well done, Malaysiakini!

PS: I just wonder whether Steven and Prem will be conferred the title of Datuk one day by one of the states held by the PKR-DAP – PAS coalition. They deserve that much I just hope they would decline the offer, if and when it comes.