By Jeff Ooi,
The Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commission (MCMC), now parked under Rais Yatim's Ministry of Information, Communications & Culture, has asked independent news portal Malaysiakini to remove two 'provocative' videos, including the footage of the controversial cow-head protest, from its website.
The affected videos are:
"These videos contain offensive contents with the intent to annoy any person, especially Indians," said Abdul Halim Ahmad, MCMC's monitoring and enforcement division senior acting director, in a letter dated Sept 3.
"This is an offence under Section 211/233 of the Communication and Multimedia Act 1998," added MCMC.
Under the communication and multimedia law, any individual found guilty of publishing content "which is indecent, obscene, false, menacing, or offensive in character with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten or harass any person" is liable to a fine of up to RM50,000 or a jail sentence.
Editor: Our intention was not to offend
Commenting on MCMC's request, Malaysiakini editor-in-chief Steven Gan said both the videos are news events which are of public interest."Our intent in putting up the videos was not to 'annoy' anyone, but to do our job as journalists to draw attention to the protest and to ensure action is taken so that incidents like this will not happen again in Malaysia."
Gan said that there was no plan for Malaysiakini to take down the videos and the news website was seeking legal advice on the matter.
Late this afternoon, MCMC made an appointment with Gan for his statement to be recorded at the Malaysiakini office in Bangsar Utama tomorrow.
No comments:
Post a Comment