Hi everyone once again, previous week Dr Sharon has
discussed in the class about Media in Malaysia and it strikes me back to the
past where all the chaotic and imbalance politics happened in Malaysia and I’ve
learned that politics in Malaysia are mostly ruled over by the government and
their increasingly concentrated ruling party, Barisan National. And of course,
it is one-sided kind of thing.
Malaysia's press system until today is an inheritance of the British colonial era. It became an influential medium for the populace to voice their opinions of the colonial government in pre-independant Malaya.
Today, most of the media is owned by the country's ruling party, Barisan National. As you can see, the picture below is an interesting table of Media Ownership.
Basically what the picture is trying to say that each media group owns certain type of media in the country.
Barisan National owns Media Prima and indirectly, news portals and broadcasters will take advantage to censor what is bad and spread propaganda about their good to the citizens whereas the opposition are low on advantages because of the majority ownership by the government.
Further on, there are some censorship which is main controlled by the government to prevent people outside of the country from knowing the truth. For example, Bersih. Bersih in another word is called Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections is a protest event where people come together to seek clean election due to the 'dirty tricks' used by the government to win the election. Hence, rakyat (citizen) are not happy with the result of what they get and wants to demand what is right, such as preventing corruption, dirty politics, cleaner election and so forth.
There are more information about the reformation in this source from the net :
http://www.bersih.org/?page_id=352
As you can see the censorship in Malaysia is quiet strong and here is a video showing two different news being broadcast in BBC, UK and ASTRO, Malaysia
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTGogMq9NZ0
This is just one of the example where the government censored some of the scenes to prevent its citizens from the real truth. They may claim that it is to prevent feud but it is however a subjective matter.
