UMNO BARISANISM Repertoires of Repression This Is Not a Facebook, Twitter or Wiki Revolution! When will the Unculture Minister Datuk Seri will burn himself

On a more serious note ... Is anyone wondering what Obama and Mubarak talked about for a half an hour the night of his speech and before the Goons went in yesterday I don't think it's accurate to say that Murbarak's statement that he would leave in 7 months is a "halfway concession". In fact, that would basically defeat what the Egyptian people are asking for. They want a whole new government, with radically different sets of rules. Doing another election in seven months is just more of the same. His son would probably run for office and win a rigged election.

For all its polished public relations and glitzy tourism advertisements Malaysia is far from the shining example of a multi-cultural harmonious and thriving democracy. Indeed scholars of Southeast Asian politics have for over two decades categorized Malaysia as an illiberal democracy, a semi-democracy or an example of electoral authoritarianism. Freedom House, the Washington D.C. based think-tank and advocacy group has consistently designated the country as ‘partly free’ in its annual ‘Freedom in the World’ reports.   Nowhere is this more apparent than in the country’s print and television media where a combination of legislative checks, and the concentration of media ownership in a small number of companies that are linked to the state and/or the ruling National Front coalition, ensures that the media is at best shackled and at worst compliant.  By way of an indication the France-based advocacy group Reporters without Borders has consistently placed Malaysia among the worst performing 25-33 percent of countries in its press freedom index in the last decade. Furthermore whereas between 2002-2006 the trend was toward greater freedom, since 2007 there has been a notable reverse. In its most recent report for 2010 Malaysia was placed 141^st out of 178 behind Russia and even its equally authoritarian neighbor Singapore!

The curious exception to this has been the country’s online media, which has thrived, and matured into a vibrant alternative source of analysis, information, and comment.  The online newspaperMalaysiakini has become one of the most widely read and trusted sources of independent news both in the country and across the region while a veritable army of bloggers have emerged over the past five years themselves becoming widely influential. Indeed in the momentous 2008 general election which saw the ruling coalition lose its two-thirds majority in parliament for the first time since 1969, two of the country’s most prominent bloggers were elected to parliament, while a further three were elected to state assemblies.

The reason for this seeming contradiction lies in the fact that in the 1990 former Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad launched a much-vaunted mega-project called the Multimedia Super Corridor.  A quasi-industrial park with dedicated high-speed Internet access the MSC sought to attract foreign high-tech investment not just by offering tax breaks, but also by ensuring in its Bill of Guarantees that the government would not censor the Internet.  Much to the chagrin of the government the Internet blossomed in Malaysia from a cacophony of accusatory diatribes into a trusted source of information, and this was long before Facebook and Twitter burst onto the scene. In the 1998 elections students were printing off articles and comments from Malaysiakini, The Free Anwar campaign (then led by Raja Petra Kamaruddin who would later become a prominent anti-government blogger), and various websites of opposition political parties, photocopying those articles and distributing them across the country when they would travel home to their families and friends in areas of the country where the internet had yet to penetrate. A decade latter and the impact would be even greater. Reading the official media in the election campaign of 2008 one would have hardly thought the opposition Pakatan Rakyat was a credible force so triumphant was the coverage of the successes of the government and so limited the coverage of opposition figures and their policies (relegated to extremely brief descriptive stories at best and stinging critique at worst). When early results indicated the scale of the opposition’s success in 2008 the official media went largely silent not knowing how to respond resulting in hundreds of thousands flocking to Malaysiakini for information, overloading the site with traffic and forcing the organization to quickly launch multiple mirror sites.

Talk about a Fourth Estate feedback loop: Over the past few weeks, some journalists have skewered the Society of Professional Journalists for its decision to stop awarding a journalism award named after a controversial journalist.

Here's what happened...

On Jan. 14, SPJ -- the nation's largest journalism organization with 8,000 members -- decided to "retire" its Helen Thomas Lifetime Achievement Award. The decision came after the award's namesake, the famous former White House correspondent, said last Maythat Jews should "get the hell out of Palestine" and added in December, "Congress, the White House and Hollywood, Wall Street are owned by the Zionists. No question."

SPJ's decision has been covered by industry insiders like the Columbia Journalism Reviewand mainstream media outlets like NBC Washington. And it's provoked heat from both sides.

When AOL wrote about it on Jan. 19, it spawned 1,346 comments -- with the very first one pointing out, "This is absurd! A society of journalists punishing one of their own for exercizing freedom of speech??? What a crock!!!!"

(Of course, three question marks, four exclamation points, and the misspelling ofexercising can also be considered a crock.)

Even a former SPJ president wrote in the Denver Post, "SPJ leaders have practically twisted themselves into pretzels to justify this shameful decision" and ominously warned, "Many are already mounting protests."

Meanwhile, SPJ leaders have managed their own news so feebly, they couldn't mount a pony. They've ignored all the lessons journalists (should) have learned from covering other people's controversies...

MISTAKE NO. 1: SAY NOTHING

Back in June, SPJ's board of directors received an email from an irate journalist, demanding Helen Thomas' name be removed from the award. How do I know this? I served on that board until last fall. So I emailed my peers and begged for debate. Their consensus was summed up by this plea from the SPJ president, who insisted it would be discussed later: "Let's please agree that we don't need to kick up a lot of dust on this issue before then."

Lesson: Deal with controversy quickly. You don't have to make a decision right away, but you need to acknowledge its existence and set a public schedule for getting to it.

MISTAKE NO. 2: THINK NOTHING

I urged SPJ to do something to get ahead of this story. At the very least, I wanted us to announce we'd never name another award after a living person. I also wanted to poll our 8,000 members and get them involved. Those ideas died in silence.

Lessons: In most controversies, there are uncontroversial things you can do to prevent the same thing from happening again. And seeking the opinions of others without declaring your own gives you time to ponder but still shows vigor.

MISTAKE NO. 3: DO NOTHING

SPJ's executive committee -- basically, the top half-dozen board members -- met last July. In an update to the board (but not to the membership) the president wrote, "After a very thoughtful and intellectual discussion by the exec committee, the decision was to make no decision. I hope that's clear to everyone now." Sure, crystal.

Lesson: "Deciding not to decide" doesn't look wise and impartial. It looks weak and evasive. 

MISTAKE NO. 4: DIVULGE NOTHING

SPJ's leaders felt nothing else needed to be done. I privately fretted to some board members that because we resolved nothing, we solved nothing. When Thomas was quoted in December, I was already off the board. But as a regular ol' SPJ member paying his $72 annual dues, I didn't hear about the press release the board issued on Jan. 14: "SPJ board of directors votes to retire Helen Thomas Lifetime Achievement Award." Instead, irate SPJers contacted me. SPJ didn't tell its members until Jan. 26 -- in an email newsletter with a dozen items. And it wasn't even the first item. It was a single paragraph under the headline, "Explanation of awards process." Can you say, "bury the lead"?

Lesson: If you let your opponents announce your own news, you've lost control of the message.

So from that first email in June 2010 till today, SPJ's leaders have never asked its 8,000 members what they think. And in this deadline-driven business, they waited two weeks to tell them what they'd already done.

You'd think journalists would instinctively grasp how to weather a media storm. After all, we cover (and occasionally create) enough of them. But sadly, it doesn't work that way. It reminds me of the doctors and nurses who huddle outside my local hospital, smoking cigarettes -- if anyone should know better, it's them, right?

PROBLEM NO. 1: THINKING SMALL

SPJ's big problem is that it's run by small-town journalists. The board currently has a whopping 23 members, but only two work for a Top 50 newspaper: Sonny Albarado at theArkansas Democrat-Gazette and James Pilcher at the Cincinnati Enquirer.

There's no one from The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, or USA Today, much less the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune or Dallas Morning News. There are no national network reporters or producers, nor any editors from national websites like Slate or The Huffington Post.

In fact, when SPJ was mangling its media image last year, SPJ's president was a "temporary assistant professor of journalism" at a Virginia college with 7,500 students. It's no great shock he didn't understand how journalism works in the real world and in real time.

Don't get me wrong, I'm no media snob. I've met morons at TIME magazine and geniuses at weeklies you've never heard of. And I know firsthand that the current SPJ board is dedicated. It's just not diverse. Imagine if the American Bar Association was led only by solo practitioners from rural states. Or if the NBA had no basketball teams from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami.

PROBLEM NO. 2: THINKING OLD

SPJ doesn't get the internet. Its board and staff have no clue how quickly the web spreads news. In fact, they don't understand most web tech because they refuse to try any of it.

During my two-year board term, I was chastised for refusing to spend members' dues flying to meetings in Indianapolis (SPJ's headquarters) when the agenda was sparse enough that we could've deftly handled it via Skype or GoToMeeting.

But none of the SPJ leaders I lobbied had ever used either program. Several had never even heard of them. Which is weird, because SPJ touts new media training on an eCampussection of its website. Perhaps board members should be required to take some of that training -- especially about social media, since that's how many pissed-off SPJers (on both sides of the issue) have commiserated about being cut out of the Thomas decision.

As for my opinion on the matter, I've purposefully sidestepped that. I plan to keep it that way -- because I know how the blogosphere works, and I don't want my own message getting hijacked. I want the focus to stay lasered on how SPJ always does things, not just what it did in this single case.

Because this episode involved a famous name and charges of anti-Semitism, it's gotten a lot more play than the mundane decisions SPJ regularly makes with the same silliness. I believe it's one reason SPJ's membership is dropping. When I was still privy to those membership numbers, I learned that SPJ is adroit at recruiting new members, even during this newspaper-destroying recession. But many of those members refuse to renew -- SPJ's "churn" is much higher than the other journalism organizations I belong to.

Part of the reason, I think, is the irony that a bunch of journalists can't run their own society with the same values they cover American society.

Information Communication and Culture Minister Datuk Seri Dr Rais Yatim (who ironically published a critique of executive power in Malaysia in 1995) was quoted by the state news agency Bernama saying “what is important is that bloggers or those who use the alternative media should remember that the laws remain in force no matter where they are… [t]hey are unscathed, as law enforcers did not go after them. But from now onwards if complaints are made, actions will be taken against them,”

Rais has denied that this means the government will censor the Internet but clearly it marks an orchestrated attempt by the Malaysian government to limit the one arena of media freedom the country enjoys.  What remains to be seen is whether once the genie has been let out of the lamp it can be effectively put back in again.