Media Freedom vs Responsibilities in HELP

Every now and then, media practitioners always mention and argue about the media freedom and rights in Malaysia. Last Wednesday (4^th November), mass communication students from HELP University College were being told about the rationale behind this concept of ideal press freedom , as it applies to Malaysia.

This talk with the title “Media Right vs Media Responsibilities” was organized by the Communication Laws and Ethics students from the Department of Communication in HELP University. It held in their main campus, located in Damansara Heights. The organizing students invited two reputable guest speakers to share their opinions. The first guest speaker is well known lawyer and also a fighter for human rights, Malik Imtiaz Ahmed Sarwar. While the second guest speaker is the Editor-in-Chief of popular online newspaper, Steven Gan to share their views regarding the topic.

The one and a half hours talk began with Malik Imtiaz, who shared about his opinions on the role of media controllers in Malaysia and the laws regulating the media. According to Imtiaz, Malaysia have sufficient laws such as the “Defamation Act” and “Seditious Act” to regulate the media organizations from being off their limit in reporting. Hence, he concluded that there was no need for Malaysian political parties to act as media watch dog in their contents.

“The newspapers are writing for politicians and not the public like you and me,” Imtiaz says. According to him, this is what will happen if the political parties become involved in managing the media organizations.

However, before ending his sharing talk, he also asked the assembled students a few questions. He asked if press freedom is important and is it dangerous to have free press in Malaysia. These questions gave the students a pause before answering.

“I think Malaysians may not be ready for a total freedom of press, but I believe they can learn and move up without any interference from the political parties,” says Yuki Ling, a final year student of Bachelor of Communication in HELP University College.

Then the second speaker Steven Gan took over and moved away from media laws and political parties to discuss the responsibilities and the ethics of journalists. After being in the journalism field for so many years, he shared his experiences and his views on ethics in journalism.

In his sharing, Steven talked about how he had to create a fake identity in order for him to get into a detention camp, where his is doing an investigation on various diseases being reported. According to him, even though faking an identity might not sound ethical, but he believes that he did not hurt anybody in doing so, but that the action might bring a huge and important story to the public.

Through this sharing, students crowd in the hall looked surprise and do not expects that they we hearing an untold stories from an experienced journalist. Steven also told the crowd that he doesn’t believe in publishing dead body in the media, but for current Teoh Beng Hock’s case, he made an exception. Not convinced by his sharing, one of the students thrown him another question asking why Teoh’s body is an exception.

“I published the picture because I believe this is a public interest story,” Steven explained on his extraordinary action.

Even though there were still many unasked queries from the students, but the talk had to ends at the scheduled time it was planned to avoid any inconvenience for the guests and the crowd. From this short session, students from the Department of Communication gained the insight of their future goals and career paths from these two respectful guest speakers.