Dark days in journalism

It has been hilarious watching those professional perverters of the truth, the ‘journalists’ of Malaysia’s mainstream media, getting their knickers in knots over Kosmo!’s ‘outing’ of the late Yasmin Ahmad as a transsexual.

Not that I have any sympathy for the cunning stunts of such gutter rags. The timeless tabloid tradition of soliciting for readers by publishing sensationalist trivia is a contemptible travesty of journalism’s sacred duty to inform the public.

And in any case the public was well aware of Yasmin’s rumoured gender-transfer decades before Kosmo! ‘revealed’ it. In fact, to those of us who knew her even slightly, her courage in this regard was just another of many reasons to admire and cherish her.

It must have been tough enough for her to face such a difficult personal dilemma and assume a new sexual identity, we figured, without our making a big deal out of it.

We also feared exposing her to the tender mercies of Malaysia’s self-appointed moral guardians who love to have people - especially women, apparently - whipped for khalwat, drinking alcohol and other ‘crimes’ against bigotry.

But at least Yasmin was safe from persecution by the time Kosmo! came up with its pathetic ‘scoop’. And, as its owners were aware, they were safe from retribution from Yasmin for any damage that a court might decide that they’d done to her reputation, as there’s no law against defaming the dead.

What Kosmo! may not have considered, however, was that their Yasmin cover-story might generate a storm of outrage in other sectors of the mainstream media. I must say I was amazed and amused that a story about transsexuality could cause such a stink among practising transtextuals.

The spectacle of so many twisters of the facts, closet propagandists and other cross-overs to the dark side of journalism throwing hissy-fits at Kosmo! for offending against the principles of the press scaled new heights of hilarious hypocrisy.

For example, under the headline ‘Yasmin Ahmad: Journos angry over Kosmo! article”, Star chief group editor Wong Chun Wai blogged: ‘Journalists in Malaysia often stay away from criticising the writings of another journalist, be it in another publication or an online portal. It's an unwritten rule. As much as we do not agree with the views or slant of the article, we refrain from voicing our unhappiness as we believe in the freedom of expression.’

‘Freedom of expression’? In the Malaysian mainstream media? What a sick and cynical joke. But Wong pressed on as though we had taken him seriously, praising a group of “former and working journalists” for sending a protest letter to the Utusan Group chairperson.

Hypocritical stance

This letter, a copy of which I saw on the Rockybru blog under the headline ‘Journo to Journo: How Low Can You Go?’,proved to be a well-deserved diatribe against the management of Kosmo! for attempting to increase its circulation by stooping to the “predictable, vile and crude” story about Yasmin.

But as damning a document as it was intended to be, the letter lost me with its very first line: ‘July 27, 2009 marked the darkest day in Malaysian journalistic history yet.’

Oh? Really? These people honestly believe that telling the truth about Yasmin, however tastelessly timed for the day after her death, is more evil than the entire Malaysian mainstream press printing lies on behalf of its BN bosses every day of the year? What a ridiculous proposition.

I can only assume that lying to one’s readers long enough eventually leads to self-delusion. Or forgetfulness of the fundamental fact of journalism that the truth, however, scurrilous, superficial or sensational, beats a pack of lies and spin any day.

However sanctimonious the self-styled ‘journalists’ of the mainstream media can be in condemning a crappy publication like Kosmo!, they’re as much goons for the BN government as the police, FRU and MACC are.

Just as ‘suspects’ die in droves in the custody of Malaysia’s guardians of law and order, the mainstream media routinely kill news of high-level corruption and other crimes, and wage character-assassination campaigns against the opposition.

Witness the recent Utusan Malaysia headline branding Anwar Ibrahim a “traitor” and the stories in Berita Minggu, Minggu Malaysia and Sunday Star demonising last Saturday’s anti-ISA rally as bothersome to the public and bad for business.

As Mustafa K Anuar so rightly says in his hard-hitting ‘Roadblocks to democracy’ article: “What many of these newspapers failed to highlight, or consciously ignored, is the fact that the massive roadblocks that were mounted by the police yesterday had primarily contributed to the colossal traffic jams.” This is just another instance of demonstrators being demonised by the mainstream media.

But the days of such demonisation may be numbered. AFP’s recent report ‘Newspapers face challenge from online media’ quotes Bernama editorial adviser Azman Ujang as admitting that “There is a credibility crisis with regard to what is written in the mainstream media - the level of believability among the people seems to be less.”

Despite the evident truth of this massive understatement, however, Star managing editor David Yeoh is determined to look on the bright side, reportedly predicting that “It will be at least one generation - at least 30 years - before newspapers can be redundant here.”

Of course Malaysia’s mainstream newspapers are already redundant. In fact they’re as good as dead. But as long as they’re helping keep BN on life-support and Yeoh, Wong and other such‘journalists’ in their jobs, they’re not about to be buried.

So seekers after news in Malaysia have a great many dark days ahead of them. Unless, as the writers of the protest letter to Kosmo! claimed, July 27, 2009 really did mark “the darkest day in Malaysian journalistic history yet”. In which case let’s hope there’s some truth in the optimistic old proverb, ‘it’s always darkest before the dawn’.