Bad news for bad newspapers

Keruah Usit

Utusan Malaysia’s hounding of its senior reporter and National Union of Journalists (NUJ) president Hata Wahari has drawn condemnation from the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ).

“No journalist should be directed by an employer…to commit any act or thing that the journalist believes would breach his or her professional ethics…No journalist can be disciplined in any way for asserting his or her rights to act according (to) their conscience,” wrote IFJ Asia-Pacific director Jacqueline Park on Jan 13.

She must be well aware of the irony of quoting the IFJ’s code of ethics in her call to Utusan to abandon its self-destructive campaign to purge its ranks of dissident journalists.

Malaysian mainstream newspapers may well have framed copies of the IFJ’s code of ethics in their chief editor’s offices – except that their version may substitute “no journalist” with “every journalist”.

Utusan, owned and controlled by Umno, has a record of expelling dissidents. It sacked Amran Ahmad Nor, the chair of the Utusan NUJ branch in September 2009, after he made a report to the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC), related to procurements made by Utusan Melayu Bhd.

Amran claimed that the newspaper’s excuse for removing him, as told to its own staff, was the appearance of PKR vice-president Tian Chua at a NUJ get-together at the Utusan premises. The MACC has not pursued any action against Utusan.

In Hata’s case, there is little doubt why Utusan has suspended him, and will most probably sack him, after the predictable and shabby charade of an internal inquiry.

Shortly after being elected NUJ president, Hata had bluntly criticised Utusan for “playing up racial issues and sparking ethnic rows”, leading to a decline in the newspaper’s once-healthy circulation.

The paper had a daily circulation of 170,558 as of last June, compared to 213,445 in 2006, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulation.

“The chief editor and journalists of Utusan Malaysia…just want to maintain their lucrative positions earning tens of thousands of ringgit. That’s why they bow to their political masters, who cling on to power by using Utusan Malaysia as their propaganda tool…,” Hata toldInternet news portals.

“The failure of the authorities to act on the chief editor and the journalists of Utusan shows that they are also complicit in the racial agenda of a paper that is now considered a racist paper with no dignity whatsoever.”

The leading newspapers, including Star (with a circulation of 286,409), New Straits Times(with a dwindling circulation of 109,341) and the timber tycoon-owned sycophants of theBorneo Post in Sarawak and Sabah, failed to publish Hata’s statements.

The fact that Hata’s bold statements were carried by Internet news portals, and suppressed by the mainstream media, indicates the ‘digital media’ has become the only credible source of news in Malaysia.

Editor mightier than the pen

Cartoonist Zunar, documentary film-maker Chou Z Lam, Radio 988 presenter Jamaluddin Ibrahim, NTV7 producer Joshua Wong and various Internet news portals have all been subjected to attempts at intimidation by Umno and its allies, just as Hata and Amran have. To their immense credit, they have shown defiance.

Malaysians can take heart from our neighbours. Journalists in the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand have faced worse intimidation. Indeed, many journalists have been killed, yet journalistic integrity lives on in all these countries.

But the overall picture in Malaysian journalism is hardly uplifting. Journalistic ideals of justice, conscience and “speaking truth to power”, as Edward Said urged, are nearly always subservient to more pragmatic principles of obeying the voices of power and of editorial hegemony.

The erosion of professional principles in the face of cari makan (the euphemistic ‘looking for food’) is not unique to journalism, as a significant number of Malaysian lawyers, judges, academics, doctors and policemen will attest.

Journalism, in the eyes of newspaper owners and editors, is merely another tool with which to exercise power over credulous readers. It is clear that Abdul Aziz Ishak, chief editor of Utusan, sees the newspaper’s role as no more than a mouthpiece for Umno’s will to power.

“During the period of your suspension, you are required to be in a place where the company management can contact you, and you are not allowed to leave your neighbourhood,” the management told Hata Wahari.

These words are not subtle: they attempt to impose power on Hata, and any others who disagree with Umno and its servants.

Yet the fact that Malaysian journalists elected Hata as NUJ president indicates some resistance to the tools of state power. Support for Hata, voiced by people like Bob Teoh, can only help.

And as many commentators have pointed out, thanks to the Internet, the influence of traditional media is shrinking, even in nations with far more independent journalism than ours.

In the end, no state propaganda can outlive the state. And no matter how powerful, all regimes must come to an end.

Even Pravda, the Soviet Union’s renowned propaganda weapon, was shut down in 1991, and was unable to survive the collapse of the communist state.

All Malaysian readers and writers have a duty – and an opportunity – to examine ourselves, and decide whether we wish to continue to support our state’s crumbling propaganda edifice.

As for me, I conscientiously avoid buying mainstream newspapers, unless I need one to wrap up something pungent.

KERUAH USIT is a human rights activist – ‘anak Sarawak, bangsa Malaysia’. This weekly column is an effort to provide a voice for marginalised Malaysians. Keruah Usit can be contacted at keruah_usit@yahoo.com.