Terrorists armed with words?

The attitude of framing the media as an enemy has risen to ridiculous heights with an MP calling the press a security threat.

COMMENT

Politicians have sometimes used nasty words to refer to reporters. This is to be expected, given that politicians, more often than not, put their feet in their mouths, leading to a feeding frenzy among journalists, whose reports would then provide examples of incompetence for the public to devour faster than you can say “Ahmad Maslan.”

The MP from Bintulu, Tiong King Sing, recently levelled an accusation that must have tickled and annoyed the media in equal measure when he told Parliament that the number of reporters huddled in that small cramped, so-called “media area” at the entrance of Parliament was a “security threat.”

It’s true that the pen is mightier than the sword, but to say that journalists working the Parliament beat are security threats is to go too far. No sane person looking at the motley crew squatting in every free corner, staring intently at the one monitor showing the Parliament proceedings, would assume that they would pose any kind of threat, except to a politician’s reputation.

Now, really, isn’t that why politicians don’t like journalists? Was Tiong truly concerned for the safety of the MPs? Or was he anxious for the safety of their reputations? The fact of the matter is that our Parliamentarians behave little better than children playing cops and robbers. At least the children quiet down at nap time. It is because of such behaviour that our pages are filled with what seem like parodies of the things happening in Parliament, when in fact they are the truth. Limiting the number of reporters covering the proceedings will do nothing to change that.

As journalists, we have heard all kinds of atrocities in that hallowed hall, things that make us wholeheartedly wish we were doing something other than the Parliament beat. It is soul-crushing to hear incompetence being rewarded while you sit on a cold marble floor, typing out words on your little laptop. And yet, we must bear a thousand indignities like this one from Tiong.

Never mind that to even sit on that marble floor in Parliament, you first need to officially register as a journalist with the government. Never mind that the Special Branch probably has a file on every journalist in this country.

This is not to say that there are no bad journalists, or journalists who have agendas of their own. But from threatening us to now being called a security risk, I dare say we’ve endured far too much. This perception of the media as an enemy needs to stop. If it’s reputation you’re concerned about, then there is a simple cure for the situation that I hope I don’t need to spell out.

The media, at the end of the day, is merely a platform. What kind of content appears in the media depends very much on how our politicians behave.