Biases, biasses and buy-asses

It was amusing in an agonising kind of way to read recently that the Umno/BN regime’s Deputy Home Minister Nur Jazlan Mohamed chose to celebrate World Press Freedom Day by claiming in a radio interview that Malaysiakini is a “very biased” media outlet.

Because, though of course he allegedly had no intention of telling the truth, in fact quite the opposite, his assertion was perfectly accurate in one unintended sense.

Which is that, as far as I’ve been able to discern during the 18 years of existence, Malaysiakini is totally biased towards doing its duty as a disseminator of accurate information to its audience by reporting the news faithfully, or, as famously stated by the great Adolph Ochs when he took charge of The New York Times in 1896, without fear or favour.

And thus by implication Malaysiakini is also, as any legitimate news organisation must be, similarly biased against the systematic censorship, skewing and indeed outright screwing of the truth by such fake ‘news’ organisations as Umno/BN’s so-called ‘mainstream’ media.

A system of organised deception so deplorable that it has resulted in Malaysia’s being ranked a decidedly rank 144th place in the latest world press-freedom report released by the widely-trusted news-media watchdog Reporteurs Sans Frontières (RFS).

But Nur Jazlan, having branded Malaysiakini as “biased” against the ruthlessly truthless regime he represents, had the effrontery to go on to accuse RFS of being “unfair” in giving Malaysia such a lamentably low ranking.

Claiming in support of this allegation that RFS focused on print rather than online media in its assessments of relative press freedom, and citing the fact that Malaysia rates a mere five places above “totalitarian” China as evidence for his contention that “the index is fraudulent in many ways”.

While for my part I would argue, entirely to the contrary, that Malaysia’s depressing press-freedom ranking is not only a richly-deserved disgrace in and of itself, but also by extension an index of the utter fraudulence of every facet of the nation’s ever-ruling Umno/BN regime.

But of course it’s entirely predictable that I’d use this column to thus calumniate Umno/BN’s corruptions and countless other ‘criminalities’.

Indeed, by the very act of publishing my opinions, albeit with the customary legal disclaimer that it doesn’t necessarily share or endorse them, Malaysiakini demonstrates that its bias is not only towards the impartial reporting of true news, but also by extension in favour of the healthy airing and exchanging of views.

Views that, to speak entirely of my own, are as biased as they can possibly be. But genuinely, legitimately, justly and truly biased, I hope, on the basis of compelling evidence or careful consideration or both.

‘Divorced from law and justice’

Truly biased, if you like, either in favour of or against people, organisations and ideas according to which side I perceive that they represent of the duality that Aristotle expressed in advancing the opinion that “as man is the best of all animals when he has reached his full development, so he is the worst of all when divorced from law and justice”.

As phrases go, it seems to me that “divorced from law and justice” is as apt as any to describe the condition of the countless ruling regimes around the world that, like Malaysia’s Umno/BN and the Chinese Communist Party, deprive their citizens of true information and freedom of both thought and expression for the purpose of furthering their members’ and supporters’ power and profit.

In other words, to prevent any possibility of their people’s becoming legitimately biased against them and their misrule, they do everything possible to keep as many of them as possible as ignorantly and even idiotically donkey-like, or, if you prefer, biassed.

Biassed primarily, as in the case of the self-proclaimed ‘Islamic’ but actually supposedly criminal Umno/BN regime, against non-Malays and non-Muslims, but also against such other alleged boogeymen and bugbears as Jews, Western liberals and even foreigners in general.

And to ensure that they remain as dumb and docile as possible in their blissfully biassed state of mind, Umno/BN squanders some of the fortunes in public funds it allegedly routinely steals from the rakyat by means of scams ranging in size from everyday kickbacks and ‘commissions’ on up to such alleged massive swindles as the Port Klang Free Zone (PKFZ) and 1MDB scams on bribing the biassed to keep quiet and above all keep voting for them, with cash handouts that many Malaysians cynically and highly appropriately call ‘dedak’ or animal feed.

And of course heaps of cash also goes to buy the services of masses of asses, like the aforementioned Deputy Home Minister Nur Jazlan, countless other Umno/BN ministers and members, and the managements and ‘journalists’ of the ‘mainstream media’.

Or, in other words, buy-asses charged with and generously paid for keeping the biassed fed with a constant diet of alleged lies.

Like what Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak recently spouted in the latest of his regular attempts to keep the masses as biassed or in other words as unthinking and dumb as the ‘domesticated animals’ that Kant appropriately called those lacking in the will to use their human intelligence.

Najib proposed that Malaysians espouse three ‘principles’, identified as Wala’ (Loyalty), Wasatiyyah (Moderation) and Tabayyun (Understanding), that he claimed will ensure Malaysia’s success.

But his explanation of Wala’ as embodying the values of “love, obedience and allegiance to a legitimate leadership and the institutions which they represent” sounded to me suspiciously like just another exercise in Najib-style pleadership for people to keep blindly following his bleedership.

So all I can hope is that the biassed and even the buy-assed will finally someday come to see Najib and his accomplices in Umno/BN for the curse they are on Malaysia, and thus become as terminally biased against them as I, Malaysiakini, or indeed anybody in his or her right mind couldn’t possibly help being.

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DEAN JOHNS, after many years in Asia, currently lives with his Malaysian-born wife and daughter in Sydney, where he coaches and mentors writers and authors and practises as a writing therapist. Published books of his columns for Malaysiakini include ‘Mad about Malaysia', ‘Even Madder about Malaysia', ‘Missing Malaysia', ‘1Malaysia.con’ and ‘Malaysia Mania’. - Mkini