Wong Chun Wai is the new Editor in Chief of the Star. (From rocky’s bru).

If you read his editorials you’ll know that he’s (relatively) level-headed and at least tries to be fair in his opinions. Here’s hoping he’ll be the one to lead the Star to rise above the lalang.

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The clown we have for an Information Minister strikes again:

“I hope local journalists will not dance to the tune of their foreign counterparts.

“There are local journalists who think too highly of the foreign media, and to me, this demonstrates an inferiority complex,” he said when launching the Malaysia Creative competition organised by Bernama here.

Referring to the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) article titled “Malaysia Rejects Christian Appeal” on the Lina Joy’s court decision carried on its news portal yesterday, he said the piece was inaccurate and sensational.

Inaccurate and sensational? Look up the BBC piece in question and see for yourself:

Malaysia rejects Christian appeal

Is the headline inaccurate and sensational? Does Zainuddin think that Lina Joy is not a Christian?

Malaysia’s highest court has rejected a Muslim convert’s six-year battle to be legally recognised as a Christian.

How is this inaccurate and sensational?

A three-judge panel ruled that only the country’s Sharia Court could let Azlina Jailani, now known as Lina Joy, remove the word Islam from her identity card.

How is this inaccurate and sensational? BBC even left out the fact that the sole dissenter was the only non-Muslim on the panel.

Malaysia’s constitution guarantees freedom of worship but says all ethnic Malays are Muslim. Under Sharia law, Muslims are not allowed to convert.

How is this inaccurate and sensational?

Ms Joy said she should not be bound by that law as she is no longer a Muslim.

How is this inaccurate and sensational?

Malaysia’s Chief Justice Ahmad Fairuz Sheikh Abdul Halim said the panel endorsed legal precedents giving Islamic Sharia courts jurisdiction over cases involving Muslims who want to convert.

How is this inaccurate and sensational?

About 200 protesters shouted “Allah-o-Akbar” (God is great) outside the court when the ruling was announced.

How is this inaccurate and sensational? Many other reports confirm this number.

“You can’t at whim and fancy convert from one religion to another,” Ahmad Fairuz said.

Ms Joy’s case has tested the limits of religious freedom in Malaysia.

She started attending church in 1990 and was baptised in 1998.

In 2000, Ms Joy, 42, went to the High Court after the National Registration Department refused to remove “Islam” from the religion column on her identity card. The court said it was a matter for Sharia courts. Tuesday’s ruling marked the end of her final appeal.

Ms Joy has been disowned by her family and forced to quit her job. She went into hiding last year. A Muslim lawyer who supported her case received death threats.

How is this inaccurate and sensational?

Sharia courts decide on civil cases involving Malaysian Muslims - nearly 60% of the country’s 26 million people - while ethnic minorities such as Chinese and Indians are governed by civil courts in the multi-racial country.

How is this inaccurate and sensational?

I doubt that our “Information” Minister even read the report. “Dancing to the tune of their foreign counterparts?” Just because the foreign media doesn’t dance to your tune (mentions of the case in today’s papers is scant, even in letter columns. It’s like it didn’t happen), that doesn’t mean they are “inaccurate”.

“Inferiority complex” - Oho, now our newspapers are the paragon of journalism. If our local papers didn’t syndicate their “foreign counterparts”, we wouldn’t have any World or IT sections btw.

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Linking to newspaper articles in a blog entry is very common, and encouraged - it shows you have done research.

Problem is that some newspapers and magazines “archive” their online articles. The practice varies from one publication to another. I’ve managed to find archived articles from TIME.com from all the way back in 1969 (!), for example.

For Malaysian papers, the Sun seems to keep its articles online indefinitely (at least for now). The Star archives articles after a year. The New Straits Times takes articles down after 2 months.

Just something to keep in mind. If you want to quote an article, you want to get a link from Sun if possible, otherwise the Star. For NST, after you find the article, search its headline on Google, then link the Google cache as a backup. Sure, if you’re out of your mind you’ll subscribe to the NSTP archive for RM300/year, but don’t expect your readers to do the same.

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From NST’s editorial on the bocor issue today [the other one]:

To be fair, the April 2005 leak was a minor one, although it dramatically drenched the government benches. It was fixed for the sum of RM25,000, and was deemed unconnected to the RM90 million-worth of renovations and refurbishments to the houses of parliament only just completed at the time.

Some (massive) online digging finds that the sum quoted was not RM25,000; it was closer to RM130,000.

Nevertheless, the renovation contractor was the one ordered to fix that “small problem” of damage to a “small portion” of the ceiling. Those patchwork repairs may have been sound enough, but now, two years on, it seems that episode may have been but an earlier symptom of an inexorable deterioration.

Which independent engineer did NST send to Parliament to determine that the leaks were part of an “inexorable deterioration”? Other papers say that the problem stems from waterproofing material not being part of the original 90mil renovations.

What seems to be the problem now, according to Works Minister Datuk Seri S. Samy Vellu, is that the wide flat expanse of roof over the Lower House is not draining properly.

The Star’s editorial says that this is because of the rubbish, “mainly construction waste”, on the roof.

A massive weight of water collects up there during heavy rain and, as water is wont to do, it seeks the path of least resistance: pouring directly down onto the bare heads of the MPs below

Now that’s a brilliant bit of physics. The real killer comes next though:

With the weather the way it’s been of late, the drenching of the Dewan Rakyat may be yet another unfortunate consequence of global warming.

The convenient bogeyman used to be communism, now it’s global warming. Samy, why didn’t you think of that?

A mechanical, structural problem has therefore precipitated one of the nastiest parliamentary spats in memory (which is saying something). While this matter was addressed by Women, Family and Community Development Minister Datuk Seri Shahrizat Abdul Jalil and the MPs concerned,

Right. Now brace yourself; the NST’s going to tell you who’s at fault:

it was left to Samy Vellu to issue perhaps the only sensible statement on the matter: Everyone’s to blame.

To modify a quote from The Incredibles: If everyone is to blame, then no one is. Especially when you blame global warming, “inexorable deterioration”, MP Po Kuan, etc. [Update:] It is also stupefying that NST’s headline for May 24th blares “Blame Game Must Stop” - Abdullah. Do they not see the massive irony here?

Now read the editorials from the Star and the Sun and decide for yourself which take is better.

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NST reminds us today why it is best used as fish wrapping. While the National Union of Journalists Malaysia recommends that bloggers be recognized as alternative media in disseminating information; while the latest concern in cyberspace is press freedom in Malaysia being rated lower than Cambodia, Phillipines, and East Timor; and while BN and PKR both analyze the Ijok outcome; NST instead runs a commentary by Rehman Rashid (who you may remember as the journalist who said that all bloggers couldn’t differentiate opinions from rectums [Update: NST took the original article down; the link is to Susan Loone’s comment on it], and also wrote an unintentionally funny response highlighting his pompousness ). This time the title is “The Great Unspoken National Contract“. [UPDATE: The article has been taken down from NST Online. You can view Google’s cache of it though]

He leads: “So is it true that the Chinese electorate in the past two by-elections showed they were unhappy with the government? Well, take a number and get in line.”

He claims race has “nothing to do with it”, and tells us that:

“If it is true that the Chinese remain upset with, for instance, Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein’s infamous keris-waving at the last Umno general assembly, surely it cannot be for anything worse than a breach of protocol. It was an act perceived as not so much belligerent or threatening as ill-mannered.”

Ill-mannered! Right. Thanks for telling me what I think about it. Next time he brandishes it and tells us not to question the rights of Malays, we should all just be shaking our heads saying “Tsk, tsk, so impolite”. Nothing racial about it either, sure!

To him, everyone is only on a quest to cari makan. We should not pursue happiness, he says:

Most of us would be happy enough with survival, the basic criteria of which seem to be getting what we want and keeping what we have. The hard-headed pragmatism that has seen us through 50 years of theoretically impossible nationhood has matured (albeit in the sense of cheese, a form of decomposition) into a thick mucilage of cynicism and apathy.

He ends by telling us it is all effectively futile, that we only perpetuate the cycle:

It works, more or less. A government is returned, salient messages nailed to its shirt-tails. Things get done, somehow, someday. Everyone has their say, somehow, some way. Food is found, the world turns round, and everyone lives to fight another day.

It’s what you call the Malaysian Way.

It’s one thing to have “journalists” who write fawning articles for the Government; you at least know what they stand for. But this is just plain sad. The phrase “apathetic journalist” should be an oxymoron. Yes, a piece like this wouldn’t be out of space in - ironically - some online blog. But publishing a defeatist article like this now is just needless self-indulgence.

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I’ll begin with Rehman Rashid’s impossibly wordy piece in the NST on why blogging is bad. Only towards the end does he finally start to make his point:

…The local blogosphere is the domain of life-challenged grumblestiltskins and disenfranchised pundits whose asinine maunderings only show why they should never have had day jobs in the first place.

Rumour, innuendo, half-truths and damned lies are their stock- in-trade, and previously sacrosanct standards, principles and ethics are now laughable.

Are they not entitled to their opinion? Of course they are, as much as everyone else is entitled to ignore them. I would venture, however, that everyone has an opinion and a rectum, and not that many seem capable of telling one from the other.

Before we respond to that I’ll bring up another issue, the one that’s provoked a storm of controversy in the blogosphere.

First we pick up a story from today’s Star, titled “Adnan: I was referring to Indon journalist“:

KUALA LUMPUR: Tourism Minister Datuk Seri Tengku Adnan Tengku Mansor has clarified that he did not label all women bloggers as liars.

“In fact, most of my supporters in my constituency are women.”

He said his statement was specifically made in reference to an Indonesian journalist who wrote in her blog about the ministry’s inefficiency.

He was speaking to reporters after announcing the sponsors and prizes of the NPC-Celcom Visit Malaysia 2007 treasure hunt here yesterday.

He was asked to comment about the recent controversy which started when Tengku Adnan allegedly referred to bloggers as liars and were mostly jobless women.

Many women’s groups criticised him for making the statement.

Tengku Adnan said he loved “all women” and was “here because of a woman.”

“In fact, most of my supporters in my constituency are women,” he said.

Reading it carefully, you get the following impressions:

• He “allegedly” made a controversial remark about bloggers and women.
• His statement was actually made specifically towards an Indonesian journalist who criticized his ministry.
  (for the lowdown on that, see Wong Chun Wai of the Star’s editorial, and the journalist’s blog)

To someone who reads only The Star (because seriously, who even looks at NST’s headlines any more?), nothing appears to be out of place. The hardworking minister in charge of VM 2007 has been misunderstood and he’s clarifying things, right?

Read rest of post…

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