After The Sun Takeover Increasing concentration of media ownership
by Mustafa K Anuar
The acquisition of The Sun was said to be valued at RM40 million while The Edge at RM14 million. Under this new corporate arrangement, business bigwig Tan Sri Vincent Tan Chee Yioun, who controls The Sun media group, will be appointed as chairperson of Nexnews while Nexnews’ chief executive officer (CEO), former banker Tong Kooi Ong, will be the deputy chairperson as well as CEO (NST Business section, B1, 23 Jan. 2002).
This takeover is expected to provide the necessary financial shot in the arm to the apparently financially weakened tabloid. The Sun management had recently retrenched more than 40 of its editorial staff in a move that was purportedly aimed at reducing operating costs and overall corporate expenditure. The Sun was reported to have incurred a loss of RM200 million over the years.
While the financial burden borne by The Sun management is generally appreciated, certain quarters, including some of the daily’s journalists, however, nursed suspicions. They felt that the company’s financial woes had provided an excellent opportunity and excuse for the management to retrench a number of ‘recalcitrant’ journalists who might have ruffled feathers with their reporting.
The acquisition could lead to The Edge lending a helping hand by, for instance, sharing its pool of writers and journalists with The Sun, which could be a means of cutting costs though it could stretch resources in The Edge. At the very least, this would help The Sun overcome its current dependency on Bernama, the national news agency, for much of its news coverage of local and national events and developments.
So would this proposed acquisition auger well for journalism in The Sun in particular and in the Malaysian press in general? The takeover is bound to raise fears that the ownership of the nation’s mainstream media is becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few, especially those who are close to the powers that be.
Such concentration would also narrow down the choice of mainstream English language dailies to three, minus the business publications available in the market. And this situation would be made even worse should The Sun be downgraded to a ‘breezier’ tabloid, as has been predicted by certain media observers.
Some cynics have even argued that such a corporate measure is being made in preparation for the next general election to ensure that the mainstream press’ coverage would remain “Barisan Nasional-friendly” to a large degree - which means that ‘editorial aberrations’ would not be tolerated.
In real terms, given the bitter experience of the sacked Sun journalists, this corporate move suggests that journalism in the revamped Sun may not necessarily improve Malaysian journalism, particularly investigative journalism, nor would it result in a more balanced treatment of issues.
Given the politics of the media and especially of the Malaysian media, when the interests of the media owners often coincide with those of the powers that be, unfavourable reports pertaining to those interests are likely to be heavily edited, if not spiked completely.
Worse, the journalists concerned are often left to fend for themselves if and when their reporting appears to threaten those interests.
That is why the controversy surrounding the retrenchment of The Sun journalists should not be seen merely as a bread-and-butter issue, as the National Union of Journalists seems inclined to do. For the shabby treatment of the journalists by the management has wider implications for the social and professional standing of Malaysian journalists as well as for press freedom in the country.q
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Nexnews Berhad, primarily a jewellery company, is reportedly planning to move into the media business via a proposed acquisition of the troubled daily, The Sun, and the business weekly, The Edge.