COMMENT Joshua Wong’s resignation recently as ntv7’s producer of Editor’s Time is a vivid reminder of how the bizarre and twisted logic of bigots in this country tends to trump journalism and free speech.
Frankly, I was not exactly disgusted by the fact that Wong apparently experienced political interference on matters about his television programme. That, after all, is to be expected, given our long legacy of government-controlled media.
Should any of us really be surprised by any revelation of Umno-related manipulation or interference with the press? You’d really have to be living on planet Mars all this while if you’re actually shocked by what happened to Wong.
The fact is, censorship in the mainstream media is the norm; I’d be shocked if there was no censorship occurring in the mainstream media and if journalists in these media actually had professional autonomy and independence.
So, while I was not surprised by what happened to Wong, the real issue in such cases is the bizarre and twisted logic used to invoke control on journalists and free speech in general.
Remember the controversy over the Bar Council’s forum on religious conversion in 2008? There we had a mob of some 300 protesters outside the Bar Council threatening to storm into the forum in order to disrupt a perfectly legal and peaceful gathering to discuss, in a civilised manner, a perfectly appropriate issue affecting our lives.
And what was the authorities’ response?
Well, so as the aroused mob of protesters are not “provoked,” into doing anything violent and illegal, the police actually convinced the participants of the legal forum to disband! Yes, it was not the mob that was asked to disband from its illegal protest or for intimidating participants at a perfectly legal gathering; instead it was the lawyers who were forced to abandon the forum, censored, and denied their right to partake in the forum.
On that day, bigotry prevailed. Worst yet, free speech was choked because some were offended by a mere forum to discuss what was a most relevant and pertinent topic.
Cow-head incident
Fast forward to the cow-head incident in Shah Alam. Remember the home minister’s public response and comments in that instance? In case you don’t recall or missed his comments, the jest of it was that let’s not blame the cow head protesters; we need to understand that their actions were provoked by unreasonable challenges to Malay supremacy!
The message we got – again - was let’s not question and correct the bigots from their gross ignorance, arrogance, foolishness and overt, provocative intimidation of others. Rather, we should censor ourselves so that bigots don’t get aroused to chop-off cow heads and parade them in public as a way of threatening others.
Again, bigotry prevailed. Just as in the Bar Council’s forum incident, free speech was choked; we were admonished not to address “sensitive matters” because bigots might get aroused and do foolish things like chop off animals’ heads.
And more recently we have the Wong episode. Apparently, the story goes that someone had sent an SMS, which was forwarded to ntv7 via one or more politically well-connected persons, that “rants with racial undertones, suggesting that Chinese people are “becoming rude” and that “the Malays should go to war.”
So here again is an example of how a bigoted person’s insecurities and paranoia becomes the excuse for censoring free speech.
Watch out!
We’re again told to “watch out,” so to speak, because some racists are getting upset, therefore, we should not exercise our free speech.
So you see, the dilemma is not that there is repeated censorship of individuals or of journalists. The striking pattern seems to be that the bigots become the ones who rule the roost – and drive the agenda.
Rather than taking those bigots and straightening them out (after all, we have really good government re-education and propaganda camps for brainwashing people), the government coddles these bigots by giving their voice credibility and legitimacy, while it chokes off legal forums, journalists such as Wong, and just plain regular people for fear that we don’t want the bigots to get aroused!
What wonderful logic, isn't it, for undercutting democracy.
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