Malaysians don’t read papers because of bad reporting

Malaysia's poor education system and lazy reporting have led many to stop reading newspapers altogether.

KUALA LUMPUR: Local reporters have no idea of journalism and this has caused many Malaysians to avoid reading newspapers altogether.

A university don says this has led many reporters to be little more than transcribers.

Though restrictive media controls and political ownership of news outlets were at fault, Notthingham University professor Zaharom Nain(picture left) said that many reporters in the country were just lazy.

“Our writers or our reporters are unable to evalutate or analyse (in their news pieces). Yes, they have controls and editors who listen to owners, but a large part of it is due to plain laziness. They are unable to do more than just transcribe the thoughts of others.”

“Many journalists I know just go to press conferences and record what the minister is saying,” the media observer told FMT.

He said that journalists here failed to ask people critical questions, and as a result, could only come up with “superficial” news reports.

Earlier today, Zaharom was speaking at a forum entitled “Truth Matters: The Media and GE (general election) –13″ at UCSI (University College Sedaya International).

Zaharom used the National Feedlot Corporation (NFC) scandal, and Women, Family and Community Development Minister Shahrizat Abdul Jalil as an example.

“I don’t think very many journalists have asked Shahrizat: ‘You say you are not involved, but how can you as husband and wife not know what is going on?’,” he said.

Editors breathing down reporters’ backs with alleged lists of taboo questions in the newsroom were also a bane to newsmen in the country, Zaharom added.

It was no wonder, he added, that Malaysians were not reading the news. “People don’t believe what they’re reading in the newspapers anymore, because the stories are becoming so stale, and are so supportive of a regime that clearly needs to be criticised,” he added.

During the forum, Zaharom said: “People talk about how bad Utusan Malaysia is, but look at the Star, look at the New Straits Times, look at Berita Harian. I don’t think we’ve got anything to be proud of as a people in terms of what we get out of our newspapers.”

Gospel truth
USM professor Azman Azwan Azmawati (picture below) said that local reporters were also unable to write their stories according to context.

“Everything is located within a context, and you have political, social, economic, religion and so forth. But journalists don’t get to write in a way that communicates other messages to their readers,” she said.

Malaysians seemed to lack “media literacy”, which she explained, was understanding situations and turning them into reports.

However, Azman said that local readers were also to blame. Many Malaysians, she said, appeared to accept everything they read as the gospel truth.

“Readers here don’t think. I’m generalising, but most Malaysians won’t think. They just accept everything at face value. They do not scrutinise, they do not examine when they read.”

“They just believe everything they read and spread the word,” she said, adding that many locals only got their news from one source.

But the root cause of all this, she said, was Malaysia’s poorly-run education system. Students, she said, were raised from young to believe that everything their teachers said were right.

“Our education system has spoiled everyone’s mind to be conformist, accepting the status quo, and as a result, makes them scared to ask questions,” she said.

This habit, she said, was not easy to break, and would often carry on to journalism students, and onto the working world.