Remember Pulitzer!
Dean JohnsPublished: Jul 4, 2007 11:30 AM | Updated: Jan 29, 2008 6:21 PM
"Newspapers should have no friends."
This pronouncement by the great American newspaper proprietor Joseph Pulitzer should be displayed on the wall of every newsroom and emblazoned on the conscience of every journalist.
Pulitzer knew what he was talking about, as he devoted much of his life (1847-1911) to making powerful enemies.
Migrating to the US from his native Hungary, he first fought in the American Civil War before buying the then ailing St Louis newspaper, the Post-Dispatch , and making a success of it through investigative reporting and editorials assailing official and commercial corruption.
"Newspapers should have no friends."
This pronouncement by the great American newspaper proprietor Joseph Pulitzer should be displayed on the wall of every newsroom and emblazoned on the conscience of every journalist.
Pulitzer knew what he was talking about, as he devoted much of his life (1847-1911) to making powerful enemies.
Migrating to the US from his native Hungary, he first fought in the American Civil War before buying the then ailing St Louis newspaper, the Post-Dispatch, and making a success of it through investigative reporting and editorials assailing official and commercial corruption.
He brought the same crusading spirit to the New York World, a paper he bought in 1883, building its circulation from 15,000 to 600,000 copies within 20 years and helping pressure the passage of anti-trust legislation.
Pulitzer's toughest battle came in 1909 when he was indicted for criminal libel of then US President Theodore Roosevelt, robber-banker JP Morgan and others after the World exposed a fraudulent payment of $40 million to the French Panama Canal Company.
Undaunted, he persisted in his allegations and the libel indictments against him were dismissed by the courts.
Though best-remembered today by the world at large for the Pulitzer Prizes and his funding of the renowned Columbia School of Journalism, his most significant legacy to me personally are the five words at the start of this column: "Newspapers should have no friends."
If we want to be precious about it, in light of the fact that radio, television and the Internet have all been invented since Pulitzer's time, strictly speaking it should be amended to "News media should have no friends".
Especially 'friends' like Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, who had the effrontery to "thank" the media for being "responsible and co-operative with the government" in his speech at the internal security ministry's recent Mass Media Conference 2007.
His very expression of thanks was a flagrant falsehood, giving the lie as it did to the fact that Malaysia's mass media have no choice in the matter of what they do and don't report, due to either their political-party ownership or punitive licensing laws, or both.
Sickening examples
Most of Malaysia's mass media are not just beholden to the Barisan Nasional (BN) government, but are themselves part of the very government that so flagrantly employs them as its tame propaganda tool. And those that aren't actually owned by BN component parties or their stooges are coerced into compliance, as witnessed by the recently-revealed letter from Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) chairman Dr Halim Shafie to private TV radio stations "requesting" them to immediately cease airing speeches by opposition leaders.
[A ministerial order has since been issued to revoke the directive.]
The deadly effectiveness of this system on the Malaysian media is nowhere more eloquently illustrated than in the report by Jane Ritikos in the June 29 June issue of the MCA-owned The Star, which published the prime minister's weasel words on the subject as if they were holy writ.
Far from being "responsible and co-operative in reporting events that could threaten the country's peace and unity", as the prime minister claimed, Malaysia's mass media are craven co-conspirators with BN in concealing the truth from the people concerning a wide variety of subjects on the decidedly dubious if not utterly bogus grounds of, as the premier reminded them at the conference, helping "create a stable environment, boost patriotism and forge unity in the country especially during crises and problems".
In other words, as I understand him to mean, at those very times when the government's actions should be under the closest public scrutiny, the people should be 'protected' from reality for their own good, like a bunch of children or 'simple folk' as the newspapers love to patronisingly refer to them.
With the result that, just as the Malaysian media don't need 'friends' like the prime minister or indeed 'information' minister Zainuddin Maidin aka Zam (photo) who - despite his background as a 'journalist' - today works tirelessly to zip the media's lips and zap genuine journalism, the Malaysian people don't need 'friends' like the Malaysian 'mainstream' media.
Like the Star 'newspaper', for example, which on May 13 of all days, kicked off a fawning series of articles on its friends in Umno with a page blurbed: 'Leaders we can be proud of. Five decades of strong and quality leadership have seen unprecedented growth and prosperity in Malaysia. This achievement is largely due to the wisdom and visions (sic) of our prime ministers.'
This nonsense reached its nadir in Jocelyn Tan's craven 'insight' column on June 24: "Stage set for future line-up. Some thought it was a glimpse of the future hierarchy of Umno when they saw rising star Khairy Jamaluddin (photo) on the same stage as top guns Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak and Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein at an event dedicated to the late Tun Razak Hussein."
This puff-piece went on to promote Khairy with quotes like "They looked so comfortable together. The body language was there"; "Khairy is what Umno people call a phenomenon"; "The turnout of Umno Youth people, the media and the excitement, it was as though the PM was coming".
Just one more sickening example of the fact that, far from being the friends of truth and justice that they piously pretend to be, the Malaysian 'mainstream' news media have so many 'friends' in high and low places that they're the enemies of everything they're supposed to be doing.
This, to quote Pulitzer once more, is to: "..always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice and corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news; always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty."
In short, newspapers should have no friends. And no country's citizens should have friends like the patrons, proprietors and 'journalists' of Malaysia's mass - or maybe that should be mess - media.
This pronouncement by the great American newspaper proprietor Joseph Pulitzer should be displayed on the wall of every newsroom and emblazoned on the conscience of every journalist.
Pulitzer knew what he was talking about, as he devoted much of his life (1847-1911) to making powerful enemies.
Migrating to the US from his native Hungary, he first fought in the American Civil War before buying the then ailing St Louis newspaper, the Post-Dispatch, and making a success of it through investigative reporting and editorials assailing official and commercial corruption.
He brought the same crusading spirit to the New York World, a paper he bought in 1883, building its circulation from 15,000 to 600,000 copies within 20 years and helping pressure the passage of anti-trust legislation. Pulitzer's toughest battle came in 1909 when he was indicted for criminal libel of then US President Theodore Roosevelt, robber-banker JP Morgan and others after the World exposed a fraudulent payment of $40 million to the French Panama Canal Company.
Undaunted, he persisted in his allegations and the libel indictments against him were dismissed by the courts.
Though best-remembered today by the world at large for the Pulitzer Prizes and his funding of the renowned Columbia School of Journalism, his most significant legacy to me personally are the five words at the start of this column: "Newspapers should have no friends."
If we want to be precious about it, in light of the fact that radio, television and the Internet have all been invented since Pulitzer's time, strictly speaking it should be amended to "News media should have no friends".
Especially 'friends' like Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, who had the effrontery to "thank" the media for being "responsible and co-operative with the government" in his speech at the internal security ministry's recent Mass Media Conference 2007. His very expression of thanks was a flagrant falsehood, giving the lie as it did to the fact that Malaysia's mass media have no choice in the matter of what they do and don't report, due to either their political-party ownership or punitive licensing laws, or both.
Sickening examples
Most of Malaysia's mass media are not just beholden to the Barisan Nasional (BN) government, but are themselves part of the very government that so flagrantly employs them as its tame propaganda tool. And those that aren't actually owned by BN component parties or their stooges are coerced into compliance, as witnessed by the recently-revealed letter from Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) chairman Dr Halim Shafie to private TV radio stations "requesting" them to immediately cease airing speeches by opposition leaders.
[A ministerial order has since been issued to revoke the directive.]
The deadly effectiveness of this system on the Malaysian media is nowhere more eloquently illustrated than in the report by Jane Ritikos in the June 29 June issue of the MCA-owned The Star, which published the prime minister's weasel words on the subject as if they were holy writ.
Far from being "responsible and co-operative in reporting events that could threaten the country's peace and unity", as the prime minister claimed, Malaysia's mass media are craven co-conspirators with BN in concealing the truth from the people concerning a wide variety of subjects on the decidedly dubious if not utterly bogus grounds of, as the premier reminded them at the conference, helping "create a stable environment, boost patriotism and forge unity in the country especially during crises and problems". In other words, as I understand him to mean, at those very times when the government's actions should be under the closest public scrutiny, the people should be 'protected' from reality for their own good, like a bunch of children or 'simple folk' as the newspapers love to patronisingly refer to them.
With the result that, just as the Malaysian media don't need 'friends' like the prime minister or indeed 'information' minister Zainuddin Maidin aka Zam (photo) who - despite his background as a 'journalist' - today works tirelessly to zip the media's lips and zap genuine journalism, the Malaysian people don't need 'friends' like the Malaysian 'mainstream' media. Like the Star 'newspaper', for example, which on May 13 of all days, kicked off a fawning series of articles on its friends in Umno with a page blurbed: 'Leaders we can be proud of. Five decades of strong and quality leadership have seen unprecedented growth and prosperity in Malaysia. This achievement is largely due to the wisdom and visions (sic) of our prime ministers.'
This nonsense reached its nadir in Jocelyn Tan's craven 'insight' column on June 24: "Stage set for future line-up. Some thought it was a glimpse of the future hierarchy of Umno when they saw rising star Khairy Jamaluddin (photo) on the same stage as top guns Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak and Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein at an event dedicated to the late Tun Razak Hussein." This puff-piece went on to promote Khairy with quotes like "They looked so comfortable together. The body language was there"; "Khairy is what Umno people call a phenomenon"; "The turnout of Umno Youth people, the media and the excitement, it was as though the PM was coming".
Just one more sickening example of the fact that, far from being the friends of truth and justice that they piously pretend to be, the Malaysian 'mainstream' news media have so many 'friends' in high and low places that they're the enemies of everything they're supposed to be doing.
This, to quote Pulitzer once more, is to: "..always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice and corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news; always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty."
In short, newspapers should have no friends. And no country's citizens should have friends like the patrons, proprietors and 'journalists' of Malaysia's mass - or maybe that should be mess - media.
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