Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Utusan Malaysia | Freely pandered, indecent, irresponsible, irrefutably and irredeemably obscene.

Malaysian Journalists meekly went to view porn openly when invited by UMNO politicians. Nothing happened. They should have surrendered themselve to the Police. None did.

The Malaysian Government regulates newspapers by the legislation they put up years ago, called the Media and the Printing Press Act. Newspapers need a licence to operate and the decision rests with the Minister of Home Affairs. Here lies the problem.

Malaysians broadly regard all the licensed Newspapers as cronies of the Establishment and those who are not, don't get to do the bizness of selling news and newspapers. In broader terms, there's political and economic repression. Those that reported the transgressions of the authorities are immediately deregistered and banned.

Broadsheets like Utusan Malaysia are legally licensed for the bizness but since the Government censors news incriminating them Utusan has loyally taken the cue and wantonly published news incriminating the Oppositiom and anything else by public notions of indecency.

In a free society you publish and you be damned. But since Malaysia isn't Utusan gets away with murder and more public indecency.

This scaremongering "news", the rumor about Malaysian Chinese who have only 40 seats in the 220 seats in Parliament but will take over Parliament is pure dung. Further, conditionally, when they do they'll change the "official" religion of the country and use Christianity instead which is of course more dung.

Are the Directors of Utusan wrong in law? Substantially not! Why? It's generally not illegal if on April Fools day, you publish news that the Moon has fallen on Pulau Babi. Why should you read pure dung? And why should you pay for it, too?

There's a difficult catch here. The Ministry of Home Affairs stops and bans "other Malaysian" from publishing the truth or some truths, not to say nonsense which those other papers banned and deregistered in the past, did not do all. So The Minister sits on his job literally acting like, despite his honorifics, really a less savoury character.

In this case, technically, Utusan has done nothing wrong publishing rubbish. The trouble is people are still buying them because the Minister says you have no choice. In a healthy and free society, you would "bungkus tikar" or go bust as no one would buy your dung. I would defend Utusan to go bust. Or I would buy them at 1.5 % of net asset value. It's their right to commit harakiri. But since publication in Malaysia is not so varied, choices are there though not any different than Utusan. Worst still they are controlled in equities or some other means by BN Government cronies.

So the Minister of Home Affairs commands the Utusan, by law, to publish rubbish legally. That's a groundbreaking thing, though. It must be one of those "transformation" projects of the Prime Minister. He must have more of where that comes from.

Can you drag the Malaysian Government to Court? No. But you can punish this government at this coming general elections. You have all the reasons to.

It's quite simple really. As for Utusan, I have some use for it - free, as disposable wrapping for my cat's shit.



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