Guan Eng, Betty voted out: media's double standards

It is the ‘innate nature’ of Malaysia’s controlled mainstream press that it does not, as a general rule, highlight issues and events involving opposition parties. Most ordinary Malaysians do not get to know about these political parties due to this virtual blackout even though they, as citizens and voters, have a democratic right to be informed.

The exception to the rule is when these parties are deliberately demonised or painted in a negative light in the media – and then they receive prominent coverage.

And so it was in the case of the DAP – or more precisely, the party’s secretary-general, Lim Guan Eng, and Kota Laksamana state assembly member and Lim’s wife, Betty Chew, both of whom had been voted out of the Malacca DAP committee in the party’s state election on Sunday. Both ‘graced’ the front page of yesterday’s Star and even had their faces displayed prominently as well.

From its ‘investigative reporting’, the paper managed to ferret out some information from some ‘party insiders’. Its report suggests that there has been a serious rift within the party - or at least within the Malacca DAP.

It is not that this incident isn’t newsworthy or that it deserves to be insulated from the general public. Any political party is bound to have its own problems, rifts, rivalries and tensions. The problem is that the internal dissensions, rivalries, factionalism or splits in many of the ruling coalition parties are often not exposed in the same way to the general public. In other words, the mainstream media is often guilty of selective ‘investigative journalism’.

Worse, while the internal contests of the DAP has been made the subject of public scrutiny, the absence of any electoral competition for the leadership of certain ruling Barisan Nasional component parties has not excited these mainstream journalists the same way. ‘Selective investigative journalism’, indeed.

In short, the difference in the press coverage of political parties on both sides of the political divide is glaring. It is uneven, unfair and undemocratic. This is the crux of the matter and it a problem that is perennial.