Global News Journal
Beyond the World news headlines
Is Malaysia’s net clampdown at odds with knowledge economy?
The opposition wants to cut the sale of alcohol in a state that it rules and now the government wants to restrict Internet access .
Malaysia is a multicultural country of 27 million people in Southeast Asia. It has a majority Muslim population that of course is not allowed to drink by religion. Yet clearly some do as shown by the sentencing to caning for a young woman handed down recently
(Photo: Prime Minister Najib Razak leaving the National Mosque as he prepared to mark his first 100 days in office in July. Reuters/Bazuki Muhammad)
Proposals by the Pan Malaysian Islamic Party, which wants an Islamic state, could effectively end the sale of alcohol in the country’s richest state, Selangor, which is next to the capital Kuala Lumpur.
Its rules would penalise not only Muslims that consumed alcohol, but also for example Muslim shop assistants in say Tesco’s who could be fined if they sold alcohol.
This is coming from a country whose most celebrated film maker, PJ Ramlee, made movies featuring alcohol, smoking and night clubs as well as cross-racial relationships and whose first premier Tunku Abdul Rahman, a Muslim of course and a member of one of Malaysia’s royal families, was fond of whisky.
And the Internet? If you want to find out anything in Malaysia, you need to read the net. The country’s newspapers, largely owned by the political parties that have run this country for 51 years and which need to be licensed annually, feed their readers a steady diet of pro-government propaganda.
Sex education again in Malaysia, thanks to the courts
Gay Austrian fashionista Bruno will not be making an appearance on Malaysia’s screens this summer for fear of corrupting this mostly-Muslim nation’s youth.
But Malaysia’s parents will still not have it easy as the country’s opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim is again on trial for sodomy in a re-run of a 14-month case that in 1998 generated endless sexually explicit headlines and questions from curious children.
Photo: Anwar enters Kuala Lumpur courtoom with wife Wan Aziza Wasn Ismail for his sodomy trial on July 15/ Reuters (Zainal Abd Halim)
I was a teenager then when the former deputy prime minister was first found guilty of sodomy and corruption in a marathon trial that featured graphic descriptions of anal penetration, faithfully reported in lurid detail by this country’s government-owned press and on prime-time TV.
(Photo: Anwar arrives in court on July 15, Reuters/
Wasting tax payers time and money. Go for those who cheated by the millions and real murders.
Twittering from the front-lines
Who remembers the Google Wars website that was doing the viral rounds a few years back – a mildly amusing, non-scientific snapshot of the search-driven, internet world we live in?
It lives on at www.googlebattle.com where you can enter two search terms, say ‘Lennon vs. McCartney’ or ‘Left vs. Right’, and let the internet pick a winner by the number of search hits each word gets.
As we reported here – the virtual world has become a real battleground in the ongoing Gaza conflict – with all sides deploying significant resources.
For Israel – where hasbara or PR has often been frowned upon as unnecessary pandering to international opinion that never turns in Israel’s favour anyway – the second Lebanon war underlined the need for a coherent media and PR strategy coordinated at the centre of government.
The post-mortem of the month-long war with Hezbollah in 2006 – known as the Winograd Commission – recommended a centralised approach to hasbara to avoid spokesmen from different ministries, the army or the police telling different or conflicting stories to a voracious local and international media.
Notwithstanding the fact that the head of the new National Information Directorate did not make it to a scheduled interview with our reporter on the story above – as my colleague Dan Williams reported here the strategy certainly seems to be working for domestic consumption.
Sources inside the Israeli government have said they are generally happy with the way the strategy has worked internationally as well despite growing international calls for a ceasefire and increasingly angry protests around the world.
Joe the plumber is right. Journalists are incapable of being unbiased always having some political bias. Apart from that, what soldier wants to rescue journalists who get themselves captured risking their own lives?
Breaking the news in Mumbai – literally
The concept of a televised war was born in January 1991, when news networks reported live on the missiles slamming into Baghdad and millions watched from the comfort of their living rooms as tracer fire lit the sky above Iraq’s capital. A decade later, the world watched in minute-by-minute horror as the twin towers came crashing down in New York.
Now, with the ferocious militant attacks in Mumbai, we have arrived in “the age of celebrity terrorism“. Paul Cornish of Chatham House argues that apart from killing scores of people, what the Mumbai gunmen wanted was “an exaggerated and preferably extreme reaction on the part of governments, the media and public opinion”.
It’s too early to tell if governments will respond with extreme reaction, but the saturation coverage of the drama in the world’s media would suggest that, at least on this level, the killers were successful.
“Almost within minutes, television screens showed harrowing scenes of pools of blood where people had died or been injured, hotels ablaze, Indian army snipers firing at distant targets, and CCTV images of the attackers,” Cornish writes.
Its the people in our country who want such dramatized version of everything. Bollywood and Indian Soaps are the live example. The %age of people looking for quality stuff are kind of less which is not enough for any kind of media to target. I know this because my brother works in media and he says that nobody reads the good reports about things that really matter. Every body is interested in the Masala stuff. What can they do they have a business to run? Its easy to blame the media but do give a thought why they are like what they are?
Malaysia is known for talking big and acting small. That’s why nobody thinks they can enforce the Internet restriction order.