NST spins a yarn on Parliamentary live telecasts

Well, what do we have here? There is talk now about how the idea of live telecast of Parliamentary proceedings - or just the Question Time for a start - has a good chance of becoming reality this time around.

Among the first to bring this issue to the public’s attention was Abdul Razak Ahmad in his commentary in New Straits Times on 5 February. Then, the paper on 14 February, reported that Minister in the PM’s Department Mohd. Nazri Aziz was leading the effort to get his BN colleagues in the cabinet to support the live telecast. And, yesterday (16 February), NST editorialised that its time has come.

Why? What has changed? After all, civil society and NGOs such as Aliran have long called on the BN government to allow live telecasts. The last time the call was made - and strongly supported by the DAP - was in early 2004. But all kinds of reasons were trotted out then by the BN government, and slavishly promoted by the mainstream media, to shoot down the idea.

Now, Abdul Razak and the NST are singing a different tune—summarily dismissing or rubbishing these same reasons. Let’s revisit these reasons and see how they are being pooh-poohed away now.

An oft-cited reason was no one would want to watch live telecasts because it would be so boring to watch the boring MPs. This reason is now scoffed at - because the counterargument is that MPs are not actors and should not be expected to behave like them. The implication is they have more important things to do and that should be enough to get the public’s attention. Never mind that this point was long argued by civil society.

Another reason for not screening live telecasts: Malaysians were not ready for them because some MPs and ministers often descend into name-calling and other incivilities in the heat of parliamentary debate. One should not forget that sort kind of behaviour was used by the BN media in the past only to cast aspersions on opposition MPs such as Karpal Singh and Lim Kit Siang. But such a reason for not screening live telecasts is now quickly cast aside as the counterargument is that the MPs’ behaviour is just a short-term issue and they would quickly learn to behave when once live telecasts are beamed. Again, NGOs have long made this point.

What about the related point about how Question Time in Parliament, which is meant for questioning the authorities, might not square with the Malay culture of not embarrassing authorities in public? Not a real problem, now.

Finally, whatever happened to the reason against the live telecast—the huge amount of costs involved? Back in 2004, the Information Ministry said it would cost RM100,000 to telecast one hour of parliamentary session; how that was arrived at was a mystery. Now, the ‘prohibitive’ cost is—abracadabra!—gone, in a puff of smoke. Not so prohibitive, after all.

In the words of the NST editorial:

It (live telecast of Parliament) may not make for great TV viewing, and it may be boring to many people most of the time. But by putting MPs under scrutiny and bringing Parliament nearer to the people, live telecasts hold great promise in terms of promoting transparency and accountability. They can help to raise the quality of debate, and make MPs more active in the discussions, more cogent in their arguments, and more regular in their attendance, something that has been lacking in the past. While it is true that some would be tempted to play to the gallery and seize the chance to make the headlines in the news, knowing that they are being watched could have the salutary effect of making them more responsible and behaving in a more parliamentary fashion. The voters would be in a better position to assess for themselves the performance of their elected representatives after listening and watching them live, unedited, and unabridged. Beaming live telecasts of question-and-answer sessions in the Dewan Rakyat would be a good place to start to make up for the gap between us and the other nations which already provide full live coverage of parliamentary sittings.

Shameless hypocrisy! Again, civil society and NGOs have long argued along the same lines as the NST as recently as 2004 but they were pooh-poohed by the very same paper.

Of course, live telecasts of Parliamentary proceedings are long overdue, even if it were to begin with just Question Time. But what is appalling about the NST is that it could not even provide a proper historical context of the issue. How then can it ever be trusted with accounts of other issues since it can only provide those that are approved by the BN or those that involve BN members as the only contributors to any positive developments in Malaysia?

The paper may adopt all kinds of latest technology to jazz up its image or introduce fancy changes—like junking its broadsheet format for the tabloid format and categorising some of its news content with snazzy names like “prime news”. But it cannot disguise the fact that it still has no desire at all to do more than dishing out the BN-tainted version of events.

Is it any wonder that the NST is still the subject of public derision? But, yet again, we can count on the paper to have a spin on it, this time from Brendan Pereira.

Following the suspension imposed on Sarawak Tribune by the government for reprinting caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, Pereira wrote in the NST (12 February) lamenting the brickbats the media had been getting from all kinds of people. In his words:

They (the media) are being savaged daily by politicians, former politicians, social activists, self-appointed kingmakers and gadflies. For being too insensitive, too provocative or just too pesky.

Well, if Pereira was trying to elicit some public appreciation or even empathy for journalists, he needs to do better. This is because he, not surprisingly, failed to differentiate the different groups of Malaysians who have taken the media to task.

When many in civil society criticise the media, they want the media to perform their job with decency and integrity so that the information they provide has some semblance of credibility. Yes, they are interested in getting at the truth, a word the NST hardly appreciates since they often indulge in distorting it to serve the interests of the BN.

On the other hand, when people in the BN criticise papers like the NST, they are doing it because the media have been perceived by these BN members as not doing enough to promote them. Or these members are afraid of losing their political base when the media highlight more public complaints against them to the advantage of others within the BN. Thus, for example, you have people such as Samy Vellu and the newly minted Information Minister Zainuddin Maidin hitting out at the media aggressively, again, in order to get the media to bend more to their political interests—but all that still within the folds of the BN.

It is thus perverse of people like Pereira to deliberately lump the complaints from the BN together with those from civil society. They not only side-stepped the real issue that they are done for different reasons, they also tried to suggest they must be doing something right after all. As one maxim about the media goes, when people of all kinds complain about the media the latter must be doing something right because they upset everyone equally, not playing favourites.

But the truth of the matter is, the NST (along with most of the other mainstream media for that matter) is nowhere near what the maxim is saying. Instead, it is still firmly mired in dishing out different versions of the BN line as truths, and its spin and omission in accounting for the issue of live telecasts of Parliamentary proceedings is merely the latest example of it.