The ‘doctored’ New Shameless Times ‘explains’

by uppercaise
The NST today has what it calls an “explanation” for the huge photo of a Bersih demonstrator used on the front wrapper of the New Sunday Times. The “explanation” is to rebut claims on the Internet that the photo was faked. The trouble with that “explanation” is that it does not quite ring true.

Was it an actual photograph of a protest demonstrator about to hurl something, presumably a tear gas canister back at the police? Possible. But when was this photo taken? It looks eerily familiar. Not just to my eyes: another former NST editor said it looked just like a photograph from another protest rally, maybe 2007′s Bersih rally, or even earlier.

And the NST’s “explanation” of its photograph, and the use of the Reuters photograph as backup “evidence”, also looks eerily familiar.

So, too, does the 14-page coverage of the Berish rally also look all too familiar: the empty church where a wedding was postponed, the story of lost business, the story of “two hours of madness” — even a first-person account by a woman reporter gushing about how exciting it all was. She “almost died in the crush”, the headline said.

(You could have written almost the same story for a first-timer on a Cup final night, or a Sunday night at a PC Fair at KLCC. The crush is quite bad there, too. Sometimes people slip and fall. Sometimes people faint. The only thing missing is massed ranks of police and FRU, tear gas and water cannon. So the NST doesn’t assign reporters to write execrable gushing accounts of the crush at a PC Fair.)

Of course, there will be pages of “heavy analysis” and “commentary” by the NST’s top hatchet men earning their datoships and their fancy titles and their fancy perks.

If the NST’s coverage all looks familiar, it’s because it fits into a formula. The Umno owners of the newspaper, and their security guards masqueradiing as guardians of the law, only want one thing: to look good and for the protesters to seem evil.

Another protest rally? Do what we did before, just update the facts. Rinse and repeat. So there is a stale sameness to the coverage of the NST.

The New Sunday Times was not a newspaper this week. It was a propaganda machine, with a huge team of reporters and editors busy doing a so-called “professional” job, writing exciting stories, producing good copy, checking spellings, writing great headlines, producing award-winning photographs.

The end-result of all that “professional” activity is to produce an effective piece of propaganda. Real journalism not necessary. Just reporting, editing, and photography skills needed.

Journalists not required, loyal newspaper workers will do.

At times of crises, when the future of their owners and their owners’ police dogs are at stake, real journalism — to seek the unbiased truth — becomes a hindrance.

At times like these, the New Straits Times and the New Sunday Times become the New Shameless Times.

It’s not a question of whether one photograph was “doctored”.

The whole “newspaper” was “doctored”.

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Oh, by the way, I almost forgot:
» IT’S NOT DOCTORED says the New Shameless Times. All in caps? That alone is fishy.