Thinking of the Malaysian media

By Bunga Pakma

Apart from a few visits to America, for most of the past thirteen years I lived hidden away in the wilds of Pasar Pakma.  That time was full of event, though the events concerned only myself and my family.  Briefly to describe that life, I gave myself full time to the important business of being a husband and father, and of taking care of our kebun and all the other things that need taking care of, e.g. engines and plumbing.  Talk to any farmer (and I’m just an amateur) and he’ll tell you that you spend 70% of your time and effort fixing things that get busted, and 30% actually taking care of the plants and the chickens.

Other than that, I did some writing, some “consulting” of a sort.  I read a great deal, nothing that I was required to read. Kuching saw me once a month on a day trip to do business.  My company was my family, only rarely did I connect with a friend outside that circle, and “ingenious conversation” was a treat that came infrequently as did a steak.  I was little connected to the big world of affairs, and little concerned with them, except to deplore them.  In short, I was eating the lotus, and part of me enjoyed a profound peace.

Slept, more like it.  On arrival in Semenanjung that part of me woke up, crawled out of its cave and rubbed its eyes.  You’ve heard enough about my comic scramble to adapt to city-life.  At this point I begin to note the many subtler ways the present differs from the KL I left.

Has Malaysia gotten dumber as it’s gotten cleverer—not such a paradox as you’d think—and wealthier?  Certainly the newspapers have.  They have fallen a long way.  The English press operated fairly openly in the mid-80s.  The Star sometimes went out on a limb, and I recall that the Penan got concerned coverage there.  Operation Lallang disembowelled the Star, while it left the NST intact, as it was—as it remains—the establishment’s mouthpiece.

In a way, that was fortunate for us.  Thoughtful discussion did find room in a few of that paper’s nooks and crannies, particularly on the literary page, which was edited by the redoubtable playwright Kee Thuan Chye.  Malaysia’s finest people-of-letters published their views with remarkable freedom and wit.  I recall Salleh ben Joned, Amir Muhammad, Wong Phui Nam, and others with their weekly columns.  Twice, or sometimes three times a week the latest books were reviewed.  These were serious books, and the reviewing was of a quality that could stand comparison to that of any paper in the world.

No shop in Pasar Pakma carried the NST. I scheduled my trips to Kooch (as my son calls it) for Wednesdays, because that was the day the lit page came out.  One Wednesday there I was in Main Bazaar looking at a pile of NSTs seemingly shrunk to tabloid format.  I looked hungrily inside for some brain-food and found no lit page—though the political articles were unaffected. The paper had been drained dry of its last bit of intellectual appeal.  In its place, supplementary sections crammed with cars, gadgets, fashion, which hotel serves the best [insert name of holiday] buffet, what big-shot is doing what, “entertainment,” and ad after four-colour ad. The tabloid is much thicker than the old broadsheet, and even the features are propaganda (“Look how Malaysia’s going green!”).  The Borneo Post, with all its flaws, prints a lot more world news, and every few weeks there’s something on whales or dolphins, creatures I love.

The Malaysian Today which had a good run some years ago, decamped to Semenanjung and turned into a sports-and-entertainment rag.  I can’t speak about the Chinese and Tamil papers, and I am loath even to mention the repulsive Utusan.

What of the internet?  We are certainly grateful that it has been left free to grow. It is a lot harder to hide things than it was before the net, and many people, the bloggers and the staff of Malaysiakini have performed heroically to keep us informed and aware.  Still, there’s a downside to the W.W. Web, which might be summarized in the biblical phrase “those who have will be given more, and those who have nothing will have even their nothing taken away.”

Where I work, internet transactions have largely replaced paper, and, to a smaller extent, face-to-face business, and this has made work more difficult.  Everything that needs to be known or done is spread across a dozen different systems when it should all be on one.  Those studying texts cannot find them in the bookstore but must hunt for them on the net, posted by someone’s charity.  These texts are often exceedingly unreliable. I was trained in the bygone print era and can spot the mistakes. Younger people simply don’t know what’s not there in the electronic page.  Others act as though if it’s not on the Net, it doesn’t exist, and it never enters their mind to look at a book.  Well, one does have to get out of the chair to do that.

The problem and the danger is the same for the general public.  While Malaysiakini and other sites hold to strict professional standards, as do some bloggers, the internet is by its nature a Wild West where anything goes.  Who do you trust?

More bytes of information are there, to be retrieved in an instant, than there are stars in a billion galaxies.  What is lacking is the knowledge to choose information, and wisdom to understand it and use it.  Wisdom, my friend, is not something you can download.  You have to learn it on your own, and learning is difficult and painful.

Perhaps the internet has been left uncensored precisely because that the powers and interests do not feel threatened.  Too few people have the skill to weigh what they read.  I hear from my American friends that internet surfing there is mostly about going to the sites whose opinions fit your own.  Right-wing conservatives of every stripe club together to rant at each another and curse whosoever disagrees with them. What shocks is the violence with which these people show to any attempt at logic and informed reason.  Lies spread very fast on the Net, and prove impossible to confute.  The latest is that proposed new health legislation in the US will amount to setting up “death panels” to determine who gets treatment and who does not.  This is a complete canard, but it frightens enough people to throw immense obstacles in front of badly needed reform.

No authoritarian power—certainly not Malaysia’s—likes people who think, especially not a LOT of people who think.  The Printing Presses Act, the Universities Act are patent schemes to keep people just dumb enough, consistent with maintaining enough button-pushers.  A campaign of dumb-down-the-nation is underway in less conspicuous ways.  I’ve detected it in the state of the press and in the pervasive philistinism of government sponsored “culture.” I’ll be looking for it elsewhere, too.

---

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• Invitation to Public Forum: What about the Penan?
• A Sarawakian, by whatever colour
• Race, Discourse and Diversity
• Sorry for the delay