The Malaysian Insight

DEPENDING on how it’s perceived, the Malaysian media sector is now a few laps away from fulfilling a 45-year quest to regulate itself, and the Pakatan Harapan (PH) government took another step to keep its promises.

Both are worthy of celebrating in a nation where a small step is a giant leap at times. 

Malaysian media has been through a lot over the years, from private ventures to being bought up by political parties and used as mouthpieces to journalists being used, abused and thrown in lock-ups for their own protection or being hauled up to explain their reportage.

But PH campaigned on freeing the media, and in the past 20 months, Communications and Multimedia Minister Gobind Singh Deo and Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s media adviser Abdul Kadir Jasin have worked on this idea with various stakeholders to reach this point – a pro tem committee to form the Malaysian Media Council.

And fair to say to Gobind and Kadir, thank you for bringing it this far in the past 20 months, as opposed to the feet-dragging since 1974 for this to even happen.

Twelve of us, including me, from the media sector are to sit down with five more media representatives and some government representatives to look into five key areas, including the council’s objective and function, its constitution and membership, code of conduct, dispute resolution methods, and general provisions including reviewing current laws.

We’ll have two months to do this for a sector that is now facing the challenges of falling revenues and shrinking audiences but increasing scrutiny with rising awareness of fake news and propaganda among us.

So, let’s not break out the champagne and congratulate the ones in the pro tem committee just yet. The task is to deliver a comprehensive and workable result from the ideals and concerns of all stakeholders – from journalists to editors to publishers to lawmakers, civil servants and finally, the people of Malaysia.

In other words, a committee chasing unicorns to create a horse and finally, and hopefully, ending up with something that is not a camel. 

Malaysia needs a free and responsible news media, and the council is one step towards that. For too long, political and business interests have bought news outfits to shape and turn it into their tools.

But technology and growing audience sophistication is snuffing out print media and broadcast media has lost out to digital, where streaming services, portals and social media serve a fragmented market.

Our challenge is to keep all this free and responsible to itself and the audience – so that we don’t end up being a nanny state or susceptible to influence from politicians and vested interests.

Congratulate Malaysia and the pro tem committee then if that can be done, be it two months or soon after that, for the better Malaysia that we wish for all of us. – January 16, 2020.

* Jahabar Sadiq runs The Malaysian Insight.