UTUSAN MALAYSIA SHOULD BE DECLARED A NATIONAL HERITAGE. – PART III.

…BAN NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES THAT ACT AS AGENTS OF FOREIGN COUNTRIES AND INTERESTS, AND ARREST THE PUBLISHERS AND EDITORS AND CHARGE THEM FOR ESPIONAGE.
By Mansor Puteh


(NOTE: This is the final segment of this essay and the lengthiest of the three.)

WITHOUT A NEW MALAYSIAN JOURNALISM, THERE CAN NEVER BE A NEW MALAYSIA.

1MALAYSIA REQUIRES A 1MALAYSIAN JOURNALISM TO MAKE IT HAPPEN: OTHERWISE, IT IS NOTHING BUT AN EMPTY SLOGAN CREATED FOR PURE ENTERTAINMENT AND A NEW THEME FOR VIDEO CLIPS AND SONGS.

WHAT THEY HAVE BEEN DOING IS SO BLATANT; YET, NO ONE SEEMS TO HAVE NOTICED IT.

Just look at the damage they had done to the country and the society. Shouldn’t the papers be banned and their editors arrested for engaging in espionage so openly?

Unlike spies and other secret operatives of foreign countries in Malaysia, these publications are even worse – they publish bad news and information for Malaysians. It is done with the intention to destabilize the country and confuse the people on an everyday basis.

It is therefore ironic how many of them had been awarded the honorific titles of Datuk. How horrific!

To a lot of extent they have indeed succeeded. But will the government continue to allow them to create worse situations?

If not for the existence of Utusan, the situation in Malaysia could be worse today which plays the role to stabilize the country, a role which cannot be taken for granted by the government and everybody in the country.

What can the ministry of home affairs or the Kementerian Dalam Negeri (KDN) do to reshape Malaysian journalism and the thinking of its citizens and erasing racial lines that divide them?

Haven’t they seen how some newspapers have been doing the bidding for other countries all this while to realize that the problems faced by the government and country are all attributed to their editorial policies?

Don’t they know that the non-Melayu publishers and editors and many of their writers suffer from a siege mentality and who act in defiance of local values?

Theirs is a psychology and mission that had been uncalculated from the limited interaction with the Melayu majority and the vernacular Mandarin and Tamil education that they had had early in their lives although this was not described to them by their teachers in words or deeds.

It is therefore now very difficult to change or be reshaped to make them more realistic despite the many slogans that had been created by the government.

The parliamentarians, social, cultural, linguistic, religious and other pseudo-politicians are blind not to see it as a problem that has caused the country to be turned upside down; they are only interested in petty issues.

KDN must impose stringent rules and regulations on what the papers can publish, and those related to foreign cultures, the cinema, television and music must be restricted while the Melayu and other local ones highlighted.

Only in this way can the government and country create new Malaysian journalism that does Malaysia a service instead of those foreign countries.

1Malaysia can only be created with Malaysia journalism. The present old Malaysian journalism is bad for the new Malaysia.

Most of the social, cultural, linguistic, economic as well as political problems faced by Malaysia today are due to the Old Malaysian Journalism which gives too much attention to the needs and demands of the minority instead of the majority.

So no wonder the rural areas in Peninsula and East Malaysia are severely neglected, as the attention and focus for economic development seems to concentrate on the Kelang Valley and other urban centers.

And so no wonder too, more and more Melayu ancestral lands had to give way to the expansion of the cities and urban centers.

This forced the Melayu to be further displaced and their cultural and religious characters changed, with the Indians being forced out of their rubber estates with no where to go to.

Too much emphasis has been given to the cities and towns and other urban centers which are all due to the attention given by the media which is dominated and controlled by the minority groups.

In this regard, one can say that blogging in Malaysia is no different. It is still dominated by so few people who are so loud and brash who are always capable of turning a morsel into a meal.

So still want to know which is the most Malaysian newspaper? And which is the most un-Malaysian newspaper?

Chauvinisms are being promoted in subtle ways, when they over-promote Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, India and America almost everyday.

Which papers over-promote and over-publicize Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, India and America? Haven’t you guessed which the ones are? They are the vernacular Mandarin and Tamil newspapers and the English language papers.

They have awards for the best writers given by the Malaysian Press Institute (MPI), but they do not have the worse paper which does not do a service to the country but to the others as mentioned a while ago. If the MPI does that, surely the editors and writers of these papers would have won the awards.

Some like-minded Malaysians should create a new award to give those who use their papers for the service of foreign countries, so they know this is how low Malaysian journalism has become. So the home ministry knows who they can give the KDN permits to, and so we can have a New Malaysian Journalism that serves the country more than the others.

Maybe what some suspect may be true in that some of the papers may be secretly funded and owned by foreign concerns so that the interests of their countries can be maintained, so that their film and television programs as well as music can continue to be imported into the country, and so that the presence of Hong Kong, China and Taiwan and India can be felt.

This is what Malaysian journalism has come to, that the papers which are controlled by different groups of people from the different racial backgrounds are using their organ to propaganda their personal ideology.

They hope no one in the country can expose this.

Is it something that they did not want to know of? If it is, then they have succeeded up to this far.

It is no fault of their that they have to do it that way, that the Chinese-controlled Chinese or Mandarin papers are too Chinese with Hong Kong, Taiwan and China thrown in.

It’s the same with the Tamil papers which seem to over-promote India. One fact which is striking is how an Indian-Muslim editor-in-chief of one of the Tamil daily could also do it. It’s probably due to the readership of his paper who is mostly Indians with many of them who are from Indian and working in the many food stalls in the country; they want to keep in touch with their country.

But one cannot believe how the English language dailies and weeklies can also have similar sentiments and approaches, with the Star heading the list.

There will be some people – the smarter ones who will want to say that this paper is more like an unofficial organ of Hong Kong and the other Chinese countries, including America.

The Malays that are reported and shown in this paper are too few. At times there are days when there is no Malay who is good enough for this paper to write on.

Most of the time, however, the Malays they prefer to report are those who are involved in crimes.

And no doubt that they have some Melayu working for them as sub-editors or editors and journalists, but they often have to go along with the flow.

No wonder, too, their columnists who are Melayu have to write like them on issues affecting the Melayu and Islam; or else they would not have been offered the columns in the first place.

Many people guess why Marina Mahathir was offered her column which was to ensure that it was not banned again.

As for the column held by IKIM it is just to show that they are also interested to offer their readers some views on Islam written by such a respectable authority on the religion.

And what about the Sun?

Their columnists who are Melayu know they have to write what is palatable to their editors. It’s as simple as that.

In the end the papers in Malaysia only manage to look at the country called Malaysia from the points of view of the races of the respective owners and editors.

Is it not sad that such a situation has to happen? It is not. It is a fact of life in Malaysia where racial backgrounds and sentiments are often exposed indirectly by what the editors and journalists publish.

So if a Chinese or Indian journalist were to write on a city, he will not forget to write and shot photos of his respective temples, and no masjid.

The vernacular Mandarin and Tamil papers are even worse than the English tabloids; they do not cover activities of the Melayu. So there is no write-up or review of Melayu films. They also do not care for the cultural activities of the Melayu and only write on the Melayu who are in politics, simply because they do not have much of a choice.

These papers mostly cover events, incidents and even gossips from Hong Kong, China and Taiwan or India and America like they are doing these countries a service for promoting them to their Chinese and Indian readers in Malaysia.

And what is the ministry of home affairs or ‘kementerian dalam negeri’ (KDN) doing about this? And what are the so-called think tankers doing about it to? Nothing.

The whole thing escapes them. They do not realize how the papers which over-promote foreign countries are indirectly saying that Malaysia and Malaysians are not important.

Worse, the vernacular papers do not care to expose their readers to what the Melayu are doing.

And the English language papers and magazines cover too much on activities in America. So they are basically fake or pseudo-American publications.

How sad, and how pathetic.

The Malaysian Press Institute and National Union of Journalists (NUJ) do not seem to care with what has happened to Malaysian journalism, in that it is serving not Malaysia but the other countries more.

By right the KDN which issues the publishing permits every year for the papers to get before they can publish their papers, must ensure that these permits are to be used for the betterment of Malaysia and Malaysians and not of the other countries.

These papers and their editors are probably under the secret payroll of some foreign agents, for all we care, if they care too much for their well-being.

Its time that the KDN does something about this problem. It is not a small one, but a major problem which has resulted in the country and its society being turned upside down and unusual social, cultural, religious and even political problems had been created because of that.

Which is the most Malaysian newspaper? Which is the most nationalistic newspaper in Malaysia that serves the country more than the other countries?

Based on past records it must be Utusan followed by Berita. And the fact that these papers are nationalist papers which had been in existence before Merdeka whose editorials had supported Merdeka, make them to be far different that the other papers.

One cannot say that the English language papers then, the Straits Times and the Malay Mail to be nationalistic considering that their editors were mostly expatriates.

It took a long while before the posts were handed to the locals who turned their editorial policies around but not by very much since they are still very much the same – with the English language papers over-promoting America.

These local English language papers have special columns to promote Hollywood and American gossips which are not published in the regular newspapers or magazines in America but in the entertainment tabloids or supermarket tabloids.

They have to be different than the other Melayu papers and they do it by over-promoting foreign cultures and countries without being subtle about it.

But not surprisingly the countries they are unofficially representing and over-promoting do not care. None of their editors or writers has been acknowledged by America, the other countries in the west, including Hong Kong, China and Taiwan and also India.

Are the editors not ashamed that they have not been given any recognition by those countries despite them acting on their behalf for so many decades?

In Malaysia, such petty gossips often get to the front-page of the local English language papers. Even the Melayu papers now have to do it because they are now competing on which paper is worse instead of one which is better than the other.