Pressing on against oppression
Dean JohnsPublished: Apr 30, 2008 10:51 AM | Updated: Apr 30, 2008 10:59 AM
At times the fight for press freedom can become quite depressing. Right now in China, for example, state propaganda is convincing the people that the Olympic torch-relay protests are against them and their nation, rather than their self-appointed government’s system of social and political suppression.
And the picture is equally distressing in China’s chronically liberty-impaired client-states like North Korea, Burma, Laos and Cuba, plus other countries coming increasingly under its economic influence, like Sudan and Zimbabwe.
At times the fight for press freedom can become quite depressing. Right now in China, for example, state propaganda is convincing the people that the Olympic torch-relay protests are against them and their nation, rather than their self-appointed government’s system of social and political suppression.
And the picture is equally distressing in China’s chronically liberty-impaired client-states like North Korea, Burma, Laos and Cuba, plus other countries coming increasingly under its economic influence, like Sudan and Zimbabwe.
In fact most of Africa is still mired in press censorship, as is a good deal of the Middle East and much of South America. And of course Singapore’s another sad story.
But World Press Freedom Day, May 3, is an opportunity for us seekers after truth to regroup, recoup and resolve to press on even harder - to remind ourselves, too, that we have history and time on our side.
Gutenberg, Caxton and others only discovered the principles of modern printing less than 600 years ago, so the press as both a technology and institution is only a few decades older than Portuguese Malacca. For several centuries after its invention, the press was outlawed or savagely policed by the monarchs and other tyrants, until it was for the first time pronounced “free” by the fathers of the US constitution during the 1700s.
Since then, press freedom, in theory if not always in perfect practice, has spread from the US to the British Isles, all of Western Europe, countries as diverse as Brazil, Mexico, India, Israel, Turkey, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, South Korea, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and even, to some extent, Russia.
And now it seems to be showing some early signs of breaking out in Malaysia, with the government’s granting of a licence to PKR to sell its newsletter to the public, and the reversal of a refusal to renew the licence of Makkal Osai.
So, however depressed, depleted and even defeated some of us inevitably feel from time to time, this is a crucial time to keep up the pressure.
I see that a bunch of leading free-expression advocates are doing just this on tomorrow by staging BUM2008 in association with the Centre for Policy Initiatives at the Lake View Club, Subang Jaya.
This 120-guest speaking/brainstorming event kicks-off with an afternoon session themed ‘Fostering Civil Society - Various Voices’, chaired by Bernard (Zorro) Khoo and featuring an impressive array of activists including blogger Ahirudin (Rocky) Attan, former judge Syed Ahmad Idid, academic and columnist Dr Azmi Sharom, Centre for Policy Initiatives director Lim Teck Ghee and journalist Jacqueline Ann Surin.
The evening session, entitled ‘The Fifth Estate (Bloggers) as Agency for Change’ and chaired by YL (Desiderata) Chong, stars blogger-MP Jeff Ooi, lawyer-MP William Leong, blogger-human rights advocate Haris Ibrahim, Malaysiakini editor-in-chief Steven Gan, award-winning investigative journalist R Nadeswaran (Citizen Nades) and Raja Petra Kamarudin of MalaysiaToday fame.
Personal boycott
This weekend, the Centre for Independent Journalism is staging a two-day event comprising public talks, a workshop, an exhibition, wall painting, a survey and other activities at KL’s Central Market Annexe.
Highlights will include two public talks featuring panels of high-profile speakers. On Saturday, the topic ‘Towards Ethical Media’ will be addressed by Zainon Ahmad, Jacqueline Ann Surin and Wan Hamidi Hamid and moderated by of CIJ director Gayathry Venkiteswaran. And on Sunday, Wong Chin Huat will moderate ‘Towards Media and Information Law Reform’, a discussion by Teo Nie Ching, Andrew Khoo Chin Hock and HR Dipendra.
I wish I could be in KL to support the struggle for press freedom in person, but unfortunately I’m stuck in Sydney. I can still do my bit to promote journalistic excellence down here though, by continuing my personal boycott of the many Australian media that squander their freedom from government control by pandering to their proprietors’ commercial interests and the insatiable appetite of their audience for sensationalism, trivia and trash.
Top of my newspaper blacklist, as ever, is the Sydney Daily Telegraph, closely followed by the national broadsheet The Australian, on the grounds that they’re controlled by Rupert Murdoch, the mogul who manipulates the editors of his global media empire through a system that George Monbiot referred to in a recent Guardian News & Media article as “anticipatory compliance”.
In other words, this is the same kind of self-censorship as the Barisan Nasional government imposes on its minions in the mainstream media, with similarly dire consequences for journalistic integrity.
Not far below Murdoch newspapers on my no-buy/no-read list are most of Australia’s mass-market magazines, not all of them Murdoch-owned, which celebrate their freedom to publish whatever they like by churning-out celebrity-riddled rubbish.
In case you think I’m press-obsessed, other Australian media I studiously avoid, especially their news and current affairs programmes, are the commercial television stations, which are almost as dreadful as Media Prima’s stable of channels.
Most commercial radio stations are a total turn-off too, thanks to ridiculously sketchy news reports, rabble-rousing talk-back shows and teams of cretinous breakfast and drive-time chatterers, especially on FM.
Thank goodness for the Sydney Morning Herald, still an excellent newspaper despite editorial economies forced by massive loss of classified advertising revenue to the net in recent years, and its stablemate the Financial Review.
Thank providence too for the splendid taxpayer-funded, politically-independent TV and radio delivered by the Australian Broadcasting Commission. And ditto for the ABC’s semi-commercial ethnic-services equivalent SBS, with daily in-depth news coverage in not just English but also migrant-community languages including Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Tagalog, Bahasa Indonesia, Arabic, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Greek and Italian.
No nation on earth can be truly free and democratic without media that keep its people informed without fear or favour. So it’s vital that we keep up the pressure against the oppressors of the press, be they the propagandists of the People’s Republic, self-serving potentates like News Corp’s Murdoch, or Malaysia’s BN government and its pernicious Printing Press and Publications Act.
And the picture is equally distressing in China’s chronically liberty-impaired client-states like North Korea, Burma, Laos and Cuba, plus other countries coming increasingly under its economic influence, like Sudan and Zimbabwe.
In fact most of Africa is still mired in press censorship, as is a good deal of the Middle East and much of South America. And of course Singapore’s another sad story.
But World Press Freedom Day, May 3, is an opportunity for us seekers after truth to regroup, recoup and resolve to press on even harder - to remind ourselves, too, that we have history and time on our side. Gutenberg, Caxton and others only discovered the principles of modern printing less than 600 years ago, so the press as both a technology and institution is only a few decades older than Portuguese Malacca. For several centuries after its invention, the press was outlawed or savagely policed by the monarchs and other tyrants, until it was for the first time pronounced “free” by the fathers of the US constitution during the 1700s.
Since then, press freedom, in theory if not always in perfect practice, has spread from the US to the British Isles, all of Western Europe, countries as diverse as Brazil, Mexico, India, Israel, Turkey, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, South Korea, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and even, to some extent, Russia.
And now it seems to be showing some early signs of breaking out in Malaysia, with the government’s granting of a licence to PKR to sell its newsletter to the public, and the reversal of a refusal to renew the licence of Makkal Osai.
So, however depressed, depleted and even defeated some of us inevitably feel from time to time, this is a crucial time to keep up the pressure.I see that a bunch of leading free-expression advocates are doing just this on tomorrow by staging BUM2008 in association with the Centre for Policy Initiatives at the Lake View Club, Subang Jaya.
This 120-guest speaking/brainstorming event kicks-off with an afternoon session themed ‘Fostering Civil Society - Various Voices’, chaired by Bernard (Zorro) Khoo and featuring an impressive array of activists including blogger Ahirudin (Rocky) Attan, former judge Syed Ahmad Idid, academic and columnist Dr Azmi Sharom, Centre for Policy Initiatives director Lim Teck Ghee and journalist Jacqueline Ann Surin.
The evening session, entitled ‘The Fifth Estate (Bloggers) as Agency for Change’ and chaired by YL (Desiderata) Chong, stars blogger-MP Jeff Ooi, lawyer-MP William Leong, blogger-human rights advocate Haris Ibrahim, Malaysiakini editor-in-chief Steven Gan, award-winning investigative journalist R Nadeswaran (Citizen Nades) and Raja Petra Kamarudin of MalaysiaToday fame.
Personal boycott
This weekend, the Centre for Independent Journalism is staging a two-day event comprising public talks, a workshop, an exhibition, wall painting, a survey and other activities at KL’s Central Market Annexe.
Highlights will include two public talks featuring panels of high-profile speakers. On Saturday, the topic ‘Towards Ethical Media’ will be addressed by Zainon Ahmad, Jacqueline Ann Surin and Wan Hamidi Hamid and moderated by of CIJ director Gayathry Venkiteswaran. And on Sunday, Wong Chin Huat will moderate ‘Towards Media and Information Law Reform’, a discussion by Teo Nie Ching, Andrew Khoo Chin Hock and HR Dipendra.
I wish I could be in KL to support the struggle for press freedom in person, but unfortunately I’m stuck in Sydney. I can still do my bit to promote journalistic excellence down here though, by continuing my personal boycott of the many Australian media that squander their freedom from government control by pandering to their proprietors’ commercial interests and the insatiable appetite of their audience for sensationalism, trivia and trash.
Top of my newspaper blacklist, as ever, is the Sydney Daily Telegraph, closely followed by the national broadsheet The Australian, on the grounds that they’re controlled by Rupert Murdoch, the mogul who manipulates the editors of his global media empire through a system that George Monbiot referred to in a recent Guardian News & Media article as “anticipatory compliance”.
In other words, this is the same kind of self-censorship as the Barisan Nasional government imposes on its minions in the mainstream media, with similarly dire consequences for journalistic integrity.Not far below Murdoch newspapers on my no-buy/no-read list are most of Australia’s mass-market magazines, not all of them Murdoch-owned, which celebrate their freedom to publish whatever they like by churning-out celebrity-riddled rubbish.
In case you think I’m press-obsessed, other Australian media I studiously avoid, especially their news and current affairs programmes, are the commercial television stations, which are almost as dreadful as Media Prima’s stable of channels.
Most commercial radio stations are a total turn-off too, thanks to ridiculously sketchy news reports, rabble-rousing talk-back shows and teams of cretinous breakfast and drive-time chatterers, especially on FM.
Thank goodness for the Sydney Morning Herald, still an excellent newspaper despite editorial economies forced by massive loss of classified advertising revenue to the net in recent years, and its stablemate the Financial Review.
Thank providence too for the splendid taxpayer-funded, politically-independent TV and radio delivered by the Australian Broadcasting Commission. And ditto for the ABC’s semi-commercial ethnic-services equivalent SBS, with daily in-depth news coverage in not just English but also migrant-community languages including Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Tagalog, Bahasa Indonesia, Arabic, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Greek and Italian.
No nation on earth can be truly free and democratic without media that keep its people informed without fear or favour. So it’s vital that we keep up the pressure against the oppressors of the press, be they the propagandists of the People’s Republic, self-serving potentates like News Corp’s Murdoch, or Malaysia’s BN government and its pernicious Printing Press and Publications Act.
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