Monday, November 9, 1998

NO free

If there is one thing worse than a free press, it's an unfree one.

The former Deputy Prime Minister, and Mahathir Mohamad's heir apparent, is on trial here in a case where winning or losing changes everything. The fate of Anwar Ibrahim is news around the world. But little of this is explicit in press coverage here. The hearings are reported; the issues are not. "In Malaysia", says the New Straits Times, "press freedom is a consequence of the earnestness and sincerity with which the local media meets its obligations to the people as readers and to the cause of national interest or common good."

What does that mean? It means - in surface terms - that the Mahathir line on Anwar, as on everything else, is slavishly repeated. The Prime Minister can do no wrong. The enemy is without, in the words and pictures transmitted by the foreign (that is, Western) media. "Slanted, fabricated and damning reports will, in one swift stroke, plunge this country into an abyss of darkness."

If these were sincere views, that would be one thing. But they are not. Malaysia's journalists writhe beneath this blanket of earnest conformity. They hate the game of craven co-existence they're forced to play - but they face a few little local difficulties. One is that you need a government licence to publish a paper. Such licences can, and have been, arbitrarily revoked. Your freedom - or your job?

Another is the unstated way in which Mahathir's party, UNMO, effectively owns the major voices of opinion through a contortion of intermediaries. The Prime Minister is your legal hammer and your ultimate boss. So what goes on just beneath the surface - at the back end of stories, not in the headlines and intros? The golden rule is always to begin at the end. The final 50 words out of 1,000-word story may quote a despairing foreign reporter. "I've lived in Malaysia for some time now, and I think it's impossible to be a journalist here."

Thus the fact of civil disturbance may be scantily chronicled, if prefaced by yet another injunction to calm from You Know Who. Thus a visiting Chris Patten's words of support for Anwar may be rehearsed if the lead is a predictable tirade against Western 'meddling'.

The technique is coded and tangential. A few dozen words dropped in the middle of a book review. Extraordinarily extensive sports page coverage of an attempt by Malaysia's Olympics committee chairman to hang on to his job far into his seventies. (compare and contrast). When Ministers grow twitchy about the proliferation of pro-Anwar websites, the principal offenders are listed with full Internet addresses. It's the best they believe they can do, and they are not to be derided for it. They believe their readers are savvy enough to crack the code ('always start with the small stories at the bottom of page two') and that survival is better than silence - or the bland uniformity of state television.

They are right. But the question here, a question for businessmen signing cheques as well as civil libertarians waving banners, is fundamental. Malaysia is a triumphantly developed economy, Number 17 on the world list, and certain to move higher once the tigers get over their flu. How much should we care about their apology for press freedom? Does it, when cash rules, matter? Is there, in Mahathir's words, a separate 'Asian way'?

This isn't a society in turmoil. It is a society stifled by wheels within wheels and threats within inspirational rhetoric. Mahathir can make it all sound reasonable. "All over the world, Ministers are dismissed and they normally pack their bags and go off." So what's so special about Anwar? What's special is that he was a Gordon Brown and John Prescott rolled into one. Big cheese. What's special is that the charges of corruption, now produced, relate to events long ago. What's special, on examination, is that everything connects.

You can run a tiger economy without proper elections. We did that in Hong Kong. You can run a rampant tiger in raucous, rumbustious democracies. Taiwan is surviving this recession best of all. But can you run one, over time, where the most elemental freedoms seem simulated rather than real?

The trouble for Malaysia is that it has become too successful. Local councils now want to be elected, rather than appointed by central government. Opposition politicians want to see their case on television too. Newspapermen are sick to death with the nanny state. Even China can experiment with the jury system while one judge sits alone in the case of Anwar.

There is, fascinatingly, no way of holding back this tide. If the papers won't tell the story, the irresistible, business-imperative Internet will. A country wooing foreign investment can't ban CNN. Paternalism and progress are mortal foes in the end; and one day the edifice of defiance must crack. Will that, in the rupturing, be great for business? No: but meanwhile the press has to struggle on as best it can. Not a peripheral part of the equation, but a mute force at the core.

(picked from http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,324881,00.html by Peter PrestonSunday November 8, 1998)