The Rough and Rosy Road: Sites of Contestation in Malaysia's Shackled Media Industry

Abstract

recent article by a regular commentator in Malaysia's Sun newspaper called for the resignation of a minister over a scandal involving government attempts to eradicate the pervasive problem of forged driving licenses.' True, the affair he referred to happened more than three years ago and the minister in question had since retired anyway, but the implications of his call and the general thrust of the piece-that ministers should be held accountable for their actions-were, in the context of Malaysia's shackled media industry, bordering on the revolutionary. This paper addresses the subject of media control in Malaysia under the Barisan National {BN-National Front) regime, the coalition of ethnicallybased political parties that has ruled the country since independence. As Hughes notes in her introduction to this issue, the dominant liberal discourse on democratization often views the mass media in fairly functionalist terms as an agent of democratization, particularly at times of regime transition or crisis. Existing studies ofthe media industry in Malaysia, however, have long since concluded that any incipient democratizing tendency within the media has long since been subverted by extensive formal and informal control, thus contributing to the entrenchment ofthe regime.-Rather than reexamine the Malaysian media industry from the liberal perspective, this paper instead takes the opposite approach, assuming as its "null hypothesis" the position of the ma.ss media as an agent of the BN's political project, and then looking for sites of weakness and tension that might indicate the limits of this control. Drawing on interviews with media practitioners, as well as extensive textual analysis of print and online media ' R. Nadeswaran, "Take the rap and resign graciously," TheSun, 4 August 2004, arailable online at <http://www.stin2surf.n>in/artirle,cfm?id-4814>, site last accessed 10 March 2005. 2 Although now somewhat dated, the paradigmatic examination of the politics of the media in

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