ABUSE OF THE LOBBIES OF PARLIAMENT AND THE COURT BUILDINGS BY THE PARLIAMENTARIANS, PRESSMEN AND PUBLIC. – PART II.
…STOP TURNING SECONDARY NEWS AND CHARACTERS AS PRIMARY ONES.
By Mansor Puteh
IN THE PAST, WHEN I WAS REPORTING FOR UTUSAN MELAYU, WE DID NOT DARE LOITER IN THE LOBBY OF PARLIAMENT.
IN FACT, WE DID NOT BOTHER WITH THE MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT WHEN THEY WERE NOT IN THE HOUSE. AND REPORTS WERE ONLY ON WHAT THEY HAD SAID OR DONE IN THE TWO HOUSES AND NOT IN THE LOBBY AREA.
BUT NOT LONG AFTER THAT, ALL HELL SEEMS TO HAVE BROKEN LOSE, WITH THE EDITORS OF SOME OF THE NEWSPAPERS WHO THOUGHT THEY WERE SMART BY ASSIGNING THEIR REPORTERS – THE PARLIAMENT REPORTERS – TO COVER NOT SO MUCH THE PROCEEDINGS IN DEWAN RAKYAT AND DEWAN NEGARA, BUT THE LOBBY OF PARLIAMENT.
Worse, the media has turned secondary news into prime news and secondary characters into primary ones.
This is good for them so they have variety so the small characters can demand attention and their say which has resulted in the creation of the Ugly Malaysian Journalism that dwells and thrives on the irrelevant, inconsequential and the profane.
So they are not the ‘parliament reporters’ but ‘the parliament lobby reporters’.
There is now a scene each time parliament seats.
At least these reporters do not converge on the appointed senators for additional comments and remarks to add to those they had said in Dewan Negara.
The reason is probably what they can say in it does not make good news as their questions and the answers they can get in the house are banal ones.
I had also covered Dewan Negara to know what I’m saying here.
What can one expect from senators who are not elected to office by the voters, but who are appointed by their respective political parties?
Most of them are old and many of them, like those in the lower house are not smart enough to ask intelligent questions.
There is one who is said to represent the entertainment industry. He is in the mid-seventies and not an important force in the industry having spent his energy at an earlier time.
He was selected to be in Dewan Negara, but not at any one time, did he bring matters concerning the industry to the house. He talks about the other issues which he is not suppose to touch.
He was also the chairman of Finas.
How could this be, I thought.
So I lodged a complaint with the Biro Pengaduan Awam or BPA who then took action to have him removed as chairman of Finas.
How could he function as senator representing the entertainment industry while being chairman of the national agency?
The chairman did not know who forced him to leave Finas. And when I enquired with him about the clash of interests of being senator and chairman of Finas, he said the other senators could raise the issues concerning the industry in Dewan Negara.
I thought this was such a stupid answer. He and not any of the other senators are assigned to look after the industry which the minister of information, culture and heritage had thought would be the best person to represent the industry in the house.
And now he said he could refrain from doing so by virtue of him being chairman of Finas and a senator.
In the end he chose to leave his chairmanship of Finas and is now in his second and last term as senator.
The entertainment industry had thought he would be vocal in the Dewan Negara bringing pertinent issues on it for the ministry to act on.
But alas, he had become a silly senator who had not been known to raise anything on the entertainment industry whose own leaders had to bring them to the ministry and the media.
Can someone lodge a police report to stop anyone from using or misusing the lobby of parliament and the courts as places for the gathering of reporters and the lawyers to conduct their outside of parliament and court businesses?
Can the special area in the lobby of parliament which had been designated for press conferences be removed, since there is no provision in law for such a facility to be created there.
Don’t the law makers and lawyers know this?
Where in the world have the lobby of their parliament and court houses been used in such a crass manner?
Major news in Malaysia are often created in these two lobbies.
If they are deemed to be out of bounds to the pressmen, then surely, Malaysia will be in a better state of being, with no unnecessary controversies and scandals which are most of the time created here.
In the recent past they were created in the many ‘ceramah’ organized by political parties, mostly those in the opposition where there is a no-holds barred, with everybody allowed to say pretty much what the others had said before.
But attending the ‘ceramah’ can be daunting to the reporters as the environment is often not safe.
It is a lot safer in the lobbies of parliament and the courts.
So these have become their second newsroom where they could manufacture the type of news they want all the time, by first putting words in the mouths of those who are in the middle of the storm.
They react and cause a chain of reaction which is good to feed the media with.
Once in a while they are at the receiving end. Yet, they persist.
No opposition leader has ever been known to be banned by the newspaper organizations for having said anything negative about Malaysian journalism and the journalists. They need them to provide news for their papers.
Even when Robert Fisk, the noted reporter for The Independent of London and their correspondent in the Middle East remarked that the English language newspapers in Malaysia are ‘deplorable’, he was still given a proper write-up by those newspapers, whose writers and columnists avoid repeating the statement.
Can Malaysian journalism survive without ambush journalism at the lobby of parliament and the courts? Maybe not.
Here is the only place where they can find interesting news for the front-page.
They can never get news on how intelligent Malaysians are, but on how crass and silly they are.
No wonder many Malaysians want to be crass and silly as they are seen as interesting persons.
Intelligent and smart or civic-minded Malaysians are not good to Malaysian journalism.
By Mansor Puteh
IN THE PAST, WHEN I WAS REPORTING FOR UTUSAN MELAYU, WE DID NOT DARE LOITER IN THE LOBBY OF PARLIAMENT.
IN FACT, WE DID NOT BOTHER WITH THE MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT WHEN THEY WERE NOT IN THE HOUSE. AND REPORTS WERE ONLY ON WHAT THEY HAD SAID OR DONE IN THE TWO HOUSES AND NOT IN THE LOBBY AREA.
BUT NOT LONG AFTER THAT, ALL HELL SEEMS TO HAVE BROKEN LOSE, WITH THE EDITORS OF SOME OF THE NEWSPAPERS WHO THOUGHT THEY WERE SMART BY ASSIGNING THEIR REPORTERS – THE PARLIAMENT REPORTERS – TO COVER NOT SO MUCH THE PROCEEDINGS IN DEWAN RAKYAT AND DEWAN NEGARA, BUT THE LOBBY OF PARLIAMENT.
Worse, the media has turned secondary news into prime news and secondary characters into primary ones.
This is good for them so they have variety so the small characters can demand attention and their say which has resulted in the creation of the Ugly Malaysian Journalism that dwells and thrives on the irrelevant, inconsequential and the profane.
So they are not the ‘parliament reporters’ but ‘the parliament lobby reporters’.
There is now a scene each time parliament seats.
At least these reporters do not converge on the appointed senators for additional comments and remarks to add to those they had said in Dewan Negara.
The reason is probably what they can say in it does not make good news as their questions and the answers they can get in the house are banal ones.
I had also covered Dewan Negara to know what I’m saying here.
What can one expect from senators who are not elected to office by the voters, but who are appointed by their respective political parties?
Most of them are old and many of them, like those in the lower house are not smart enough to ask intelligent questions.
There is one who is said to represent the entertainment industry. He is in the mid-seventies and not an important force in the industry having spent his energy at an earlier time.
He was selected to be in Dewan Negara, but not at any one time, did he bring matters concerning the industry to the house. He talks about the other issues which he is not suppose to touch.
He was also the chairman of Finas.
How could this be, I thought.
So I lodged a complaint with the Biro Pengaduan Awam or BPA who then took action to have him removed as chairman of Finas.
How could he function as senator representing the entertainment industry while being chairman of the national agency?
The chairman did not know who forced him to leave Finas. And when I enquired with him about the clash of interests of being senator and chairman of Finas, he said the other senators could raise the issues concerning the industry in Dewan Negara.
I thought this was such a stupid answer. He and not any of the other senators are assigned to look after the industry which the minister of information, culture and heritage had thought would be the best person to represent the industry in the house.
And now he said he could refrain from doing so by virtue of him being chairman of Finas and a senator.
In the end he chose to leave his chairmanship of Finas and is now in his second and last term as senator.
The entertainment industry had thought he would be vocal in the Dewan Negara bringing pertinent issues on it for the ministry to act on.
But alas, he had become a silly senator who had not been known to raise anything on the entertainment industry whose own leaders had to bring them to the ministry and the media.
Can someone lodge a police report to stop anyone from using or misusing the lobby of parliament and the courts as places for the gathering of reporters and the lawyers to conduct their outside of parliament and court businesses?
Can the special area in the lobby of parliament which had been designated for press conferences be removed, since there is no provision in law for such a facility to be created there.
Don’t the law makers and lawyers know this?
Where in the world have the lobby of their parliament and court houses been used in such a crass manner?
Major news in Malaysia are often created in these two lobbies.
If they are deemed to be out of bounds to the pressmen, then surely, Malaysia will be in a better state of being, with no unnecessary controversies and scandals which are most of the time created here.
In the recent past they were created in the many ‘ceramah’ organized by political parties, mostly those in the opposition where there is a no-holds barred, with everybody allowed to say pretty much what the others had said before.
But attending the ‘ceramah’ can be daunting to the reporters as the environment is often not safe.
It is a lot safer in the lobbies of parliament and the courts.
So these have become their second newsroom where they could manufacture the type of news they want all the time, by first putting words in the mouths of those who are in the middle of the storm.
They react and cause a chain of reaction which is good to feed the media with.
Once in a while they are at the receiving end. Yet, they persist.
No opposition leader has ever been known to be banned by the newspaper organizations for having said anything negative about Malaysian journalism and the journalists. They need them to provide news for their papers.
Even when Robert Fisk, the noted reporter for The Independent of London and their correspondent in the Middle East remarked that the English language newspapers in Malaysia are ‘deplorable’, he was still given a proper write-up by those newspapers, whose writers and columnists avoid repeating the statement.
Can Malaysian journalism survive without ambush journalism at the lobby of parliament and the courts? Maybe not.
Here is the only place where they can find interesting news for the front-page.
They can never get news on how intelligent Malaysians are, but on how crass and silly they are.
No wonder many Malaysians want to be crass and silly as they are seen as interesting persons.
Intelligent and smart or civic-minded Malaysians are not good to Malaysian journalism.
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