Bridging the information gap
Pang Yen Guan<br>Johor BaruPublished: Mar 7, 2001 12:32 AM | Updated: Jan 29, 2008 10:21 AM
Malaysian leaders' condemnation of malaysiakini for allegedly receiving dubious funds is bewildering. While the Mahathir administration is not beholden to the electorate that brought them to power, they insinuated malaysiakini is to currency speculator George Soros. If indeed the online news portal had received funds from Soros through a labyrinth of accounting linkages, it should only interest the rogue financier himself in discovering a drop of his immense wealth being trickled down to finance a good cause in Malaysia.
Whether or not malaysiakini is financially independent, it should be allowed to do the important job of bridging the information gap that is often missing in the print media, but crucial for seeing a larger scheme of things; and equally important, providing a choice in news reading from a different perspective. It's up to readers themselves to judge the worthiness of malaysiakini's reporting.
Malaysian ministers who criticise the news portal have the entire government machinery at their disposal to refute any bias in news report. By engaging with malaysiakini, the government is in fact lending the very credibility it wants to destroy. One would suspect credibility is only a front in demonising malaysiakini.
World Trade Organization and trade liberalisation will soon dawn upon the region. International corporate structures will become increasingly more complex. The vast financial empires controlled by Soros and the likes will certainly be implicated in the media and other industries Malaysia Inc has to deal with. In this regard, Malaysian leaders should exercise caution in condemning malaysiakini lest they themselves find embarrassing to extricate from the same 'filth' they throw at malaysiakini.
The culture of Malaysian leaders tends to blame others but never themselves for their own failures. Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad should cease criticising Soros to cover up his own failure to predict the financial woes that eventually crippled the nation's economy. In retrospective, the legacy of Soros' alleged act is invaluable if lessons are drawn to revamp and strengthen the nation's financial and political systems.
With the advent of WTO, the path to achieving developed nation status by 2020 is peppered with obstacles and uncertainties. Can Mahathir gaze into his crystal ball to predict and preempt these challenges in his political twilight years? Given the predicament he has created for himself, his options are quite limited.
The fate of malaysiakini should be determined by demand and supply within the confines of established cyberlaws and ethics. If one supporting malaysiakini is a traitor as Mahathir insinuated, I stand to be counted.
Whether or not malaysiakini is financially independent, it should be allowed to do the important job of bridging the information gap that is often missing in the print media, but crucial for seeing a larger scheme of things; and equally important, providing a choice in news reading from a different perspective. It's up to readers themselves to judge the worthiness of malaysiakini's reporting.
Malaysian ministers who criticise the news portal have the entire government machinery at their disposal to refute any bias in news report. By engaging with malaysiakini, the government is in fact lending the very credibility it wants to destroy. One would suspect credibility is only a front in demonising malaysiakini.
World Trade Organization and trade liberalisation will soon dawn upon the region. International corporate structures will become increasingly more complex. The vast financial empires controlled by Soros and the likes will certainly be implicated in the media and other industries Malaysia Inc has to deal with. In this regard, Malaysian leaders should exercise caution in condemning malaysiakini lest they themselves find embarrassing to extricate from the same 'filth' they throw at malaysiakini.
The culture of Malaysian leaders tends to blame others but never themselves for their own failures. Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad should cease criticising Soros to cover up his own failure to predict the financial woes that eventually crippled the nation's economy. In retrospective, the legacy of Soros' alleged act is invaluable if lessons are drawn to revamp and strengthen the nation's financial and political systems.
With the advent of WTO, the path to achieving developed nation status by 2020 is peppered with obstacles and uncertainties. Can Mahathir gaze into his crystal ball to predict and preempt these challenges in his political twilight years? Given the predicament he has created for himself, his options are quite limited.
The fate of malaysiakini should be determined by demand and supply within the confines of established cyberlaws and ethics. If one supporting malaysiakini is a traitor as Mahathir insinuated, I stand to be counted.
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