Media bias in South Asia
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Claims of Media bias in South Asia attract constant attention. The question of bias in South Asian media is also of great interest to people living outside of South Asia. Some accusations of media bias are motivated by a disinterested desire for truth, some are politically motivated. Media bias occurs in television, newspapers, school books and other media.
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[edit] Malaysia
The usage of the Malaysian Internal Security Act on the media has definitely created a severe element of biasness in media reporting. Even neutral blogsites, operated by the media such as the Citizens Blog ( operated by The Star ) which was supposed to be "non-aligned" to any political party has turned out to be rather discriminatory in favour of the ruling Government.
In the beginning, the site editors allowed comments to flow freely as a sign of neutrality on its part. Perhaps due to pressure from the Home Ministry, the CB editors have recently begun to display a most unprofessional attitude in clamping down on articles which criticizes the ruling Government and its unfair racial policies.
While Malaysia harps on its racial harmony, the truth is that its Government can't even take a little constructive criticism about corruption by certain influential politicians and its divisive policies.
A blog summission to the Citizens Blog as follows was censored without reason :
"The Deputy Prime Minister has vowed that UMNO would fight to protect the Malay rights - but from whom? The wealth distribution in this country can be divided into two factions - The UMNO putras and the Citizens ( comprising of Malays, Chinese and Indians )
To all my Malay brothers. The Chinese and the Indians have no desire to prevent any aid given to the poor Malays in this country as long as similar aid is extended to the Chinese and Indian poor. In fact, the Chinese and Indians look upon the Malays as their big brother. The Chinese wishes the Malays to do well so that every Malaysian would live a better standard of living in this country. The Chinese and Indians are not your enemies. We bleed the same blood color as you."
This blog was censored in its entirety. Many blogs along this line never made it to the Citizens Blog, which includes responses to inflammatory blogs aligned to the ruling Government. This has created such a massive distortion that the readers of Citizens Blog have been quite confused lately. Hopefully, Wikipedia is the only place where the truth can be read by all without censorship as queries to the CB editors regarding their criteria of censorship would be thrown out the window.
Shame on The Star daily definitely. While it is the country's leading paper, it certainly doesn't possess the ethics that journalism requires. In fact, if what's happening in The Star is anything to go by, media ethics in Malaysia is dead. May it Rot in Pieces. And may the truth in Wikipedia enlighten the world on what's really happening in Malaysia.
[edit] India
There have been claims that the history of the Islamic invasion of India is being systematically whitewashed and censored in Indian school-books and in other media (e.g. Shourie 1998). The Indian media rarely reports the human rights violations against Muslim in Indian administered kashmir.
Many media stations in India provided vast coverage of the Gujarat Riots in 2002 in which a large number of Muslims were murdered but have often failed to report on the persecution of Hindus in Muslim-dominated Jammu & Kashmir. There are also denials of the fact that Indians in general and Hindus in particular are being ethnically cleansed in Kashmir.
[edit] Pakistan
There are serious demographic issues regarding the minority non-Islam population in Pakistan. The Christian, Hindu, and Sikh populations have gone from 23% to 2% in the period 1947-1997. International rights groups, like the Center for Indian Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, call this ethnic cleansing and accuse the media of not informing the public about these issues [1].
There are also allegations by Amnesty International that the local media some times glosses over reports of persecution against the non-Islamic population in Pakistan [2].
[edit] Sri Lanka
The government of Sri Lanka has been accused of controlling the media. Measures like the Public Security Ordinance and the Sixth Amendment to the Sri Lankan Constitution have been accused of limiting a reporters freedom.
The Sixth Amendment to Sri Lanka's constitution, inserted as Article 157A, has been accused of threatening civic disability and seizing of property by banning promotion of separatism. The Public Security Ordinance (PSO)law is often applied liberally when the government applies emergency regulations. This is quite often as Sri Lanka has been ruled under Emergency for a cumulative total of over 20 years since it gained independence from the British. The Saturday Review, the English paper published in Jaffna and the Aththa, the Communist Sinhala language daily were banned in the early eighties under the PSO. When the Aththa was banned its press was also sealed. In the seventies, the government sealed the printing press of the Independent Newspapers Ltd. (Davasa Group) by using the emergency regulations.
Under the Emergency Regulations (E.R), all material relating to a subject specified in a gazetted presidential proclamation, has to be submitted for censoring by a 'competent authority.' The 'competent authority' is usually politically favoured civil servant. Recently, the regime made history by appointing a military officer as the government censor. Material censored under such provisions has included comment on the high cost of living, on the dismissal of an employee of a state corporation, allegedly for an article he wrote for his trade union journal, on the marketing problems of passion fruit growers, criticism of a minister's statement in Parliament about a public corporation, and a reference to an alleged assault on two civilians .
[edit] See also
- Media bias
- Media bias in the United States
- Media bias in the Middle East
- Censorship in South Asia
- Indian journalists
[edit] Literature
- Shourie, Arun: Eminent Historians: Their Technology, Their Line, Their Fraud. New Delhi, 1998.
