Mahathir attacks NST and the local media again

KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 4 – Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad has once again attacked the local media and ridiculed Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Badawi for recently urging the media to "report the truth."

Targetting the New Straits Times, the former premier said reporters attending his press conferences would tell him that they had no control over what was printed from their reports.

"Privately they tell of how Kalimullah would telephone editors what to print and how to print," he wrote in his blog today, in a direct reference to the NSTP deputy chairman Datuk Seri Kalimullah Hassan whom he has frequently accused of controlling the mass media in the country.

Dr Mahathir said Abdullah had promised to be transparent when he became prime minister in 2003 but "immediately editors were removed and Abdullah's own editors from Singapore were installed in the New Straits Times".

"Kalimullah controls all the papers including those owned by the MCA. Many senior journalists of the New Straits Times and Utusan have been retired or have left.

"The papers and the TV have become propaganda machines for the government of Abdullah Badawi. During the March 2008 Elections the government-owned TV openly campaigned for the Barisan Nasional," he added.

In his 22-year reign, Dr Mahathir's detractors had labeled him an enemy of press freedom. Towards the end of his era in 2003, Reporters Sans Frontierers (RSF) put Malaysia's press freedom index at number 110. Top on the list in that year were Finland, Iceland and Norway.

In the same year too, the Committee to Protect Journalists had predicted that there would be no positive changes for media freedom after the Mahathir's era, and that the former premier's legal coercion and ownership restrictions would continue to prevail under Abdullah.

At present, Malaysia's press freedom index has gone further down, to 124th position; lower than many other semi-developed and developing countries.

And Dr Mahathir has up the ante on accusing his successor of curbing media freedom.

"I know for a fact that criticisms of the government or of Datuk Seri Abdullah, his state of denial, which I commented often enough, had never been printed. But many others complained that if they say anything against Datuk Seri Abdullah or something that may sound like supporting me it would not be printed," he said.

Justifying his stinging criticism against the NST for blacking out his views, Dr Mahathir said:

"What is the result? The circulation of the NST has decreased and so have the viewers of government TV stations. Even the non-government stations have no freedom to report the truth except when they put the Abdullah government in good light.

"People are turning to the blogs to learn about what is happening to the country. The government, as admitted by the Minister of Home Affairs and denied by another Minister, has blocked one blogger. All the undertakings of the Government not to censor the internet have been disregarded.

"And yet the PM has the audacity to ask the media to 'hold strongly to the principle of truth'. What truth?" wrote the former prime minister.