Selangor: "fully developed" or not?

This is a tale of how a healthy dose of scepticism can go a long way. If only more journalists exercised such scepticism and did what was expected of them, our media would be all the better for it. It is about a scandal related to Selangor’s economic status.

About three weeks ago, the news was making the rounds that Selangor had achieved “fully developed” status. R. Nadeswaran, who writes the Citizen Nades column for theSun, heard about it on radio. But he found the information inadequate. As he put it, “the news reader did not say who accorded the state such a status and on what basis it was given.” He decided to look into the story.

He found that Selangor was already planning to set aside “several million” ringgit of public funds for a bash in Shah Alam to celebrate the state’s achievement. In his column, he questioned the appropriateness of the state using that amount of tax ringgit for the occasion.

The Selangor Mentri Besar apparently did not like what he read and decided to respond. Instead of taking his case to Nadeswaran or theSun, he went to The Star, saying that the celebration would not incur any public funds. The Star duly reported it.

The paper also provided details of how Selangor’s “fully developed” status came about. Apparently, it came out of a study performed by Malaysia’s National Productivity Corporation with the help of the International Islamic University and Universiti Teknologi Mara. The study compared Selangor with 29 other countries with a population of less than 20 million. It was claimed that the study was based on a model developed by a Swiss institute called the IMD World Competitive Centre.

The Star followed it up the next day with another report offering some data from the NPC study to illustrate Selangor’s achievement.

But theSun was sceptical. It decided to check out the Swiss institute. And, yesterday, the paper reported what they found on page 3.

For starters, the Swiss institute said they had nothing to do with the study by NPC. Although they had conducted studies to rank countries (and some regions), they said they used 60 countries, not 30. And they never examined only Selangor but Malaysia instead.

The discrepancy got theSun to interview the deputy director-general of NPC. Among other things, the latter said the NPC merely conducted a survey for the study; it did not come up with the title of “fully developed” status for Selangor. (For more on the interview, see page 3 of the paper also published yesterday.)

The whole episode raises a number of questions. One that is particularly pertinent here is why did the Selangor Mentri Besar choose to go to The Star to respond to what Nadeswaran had written in theSun. Could it be that he knew he could count on The Star to act merely as a mouthpiece for the government by publishing whatever given to them without question? (To be fair, The Star is not alone in this because when the other mainstream media first reported on Selangor’s economic standing, they too merely passed on the story without question.)

All this indicates, though not for the first time, what is so wrong with just about all the mainstream media. So spineless are they that the public cannot count on them to do even the least expected of them as journalists: making sure the facts are credible before publishing or broadcasting them.

In this case, the public has theSun to thank for merely doing the job expected of it. As for The Star (and the other mainstream media), how long do they plan to just roll over and play dead for the BN government? When can we expect them to show some spine by being socially responsible with the news information they publish or broadcast?