From the Selangor Times 17 February 2012. Ask Lord Bobo is a weekly column by LoyarBurok where all your profound, abstruse, erudite, hermetic, recondite, sagacious, and other thesaurus-described queries are answered!
There’s never a dull moment in Malaysia, is there? Every single day we get drama, comedy, deception, intrigue, sex, accusations, and scandal – and that’s only in the first five pages of the newspaper! (Sandiwara, via email)
The pages of our newspapers certainly are quite exciting. Imagine what they would be like if the mainstream media was truly free.
Off the top of Lord Bobo’s head, just in the past week Malaysians have been going ballistic over the cow-dung stink that still lingers from the NFC, the not-so-fast-food but certainly-fast-fists at KFC, a dubious honour from an Australian university for a self-proclaimed first lady, a massive national policy that is either at a preliminary or (they don’t seem to have decided yet) but that most people certainly don’t-1-to-care about, and the annual debate about banning Valentine’s Day.
And those are just the ones that made the first 3 pages!
His Supreme Eminenceness has it on good authority that Malaysian news is actually re-enacted by a production company in a nearby galaxy and serialized as a politico-social drama-comedy-horror-romance and is the best-selling audio-visual broadcast in at least 74 planets around the many universes.
It is a good thing that there is so much interesting news. It is a sign that society is vibrant and alert.
However, it would be much more of a good thing if these issues were seen out, and resolved properly. It is said that today’s newspaper is tomorrow’s nasi lemak wrapper, so we cannot just rely on media to ensure that people face the consequences of their actions.
Malaysians need to learn how to use the system – flawed as it is – to follow through after the initial outcry and grandstanding have subsided.
Now that would be something worthy of praise from His Supreme Eminenceness.
If all the so-called “activists” and “justice-seekers” are only interested in trumpeting the latest and hottest issues, then they are better off watching E! News instead of pretending to be genuinely interested in serious issues.
Lord Bobo, you write a lot about being “politically non partisan” or “neutral” – but doesn’t LoyarBurok.com contain almost exclusively pro-opposition posts? My pro-government friends always point out that this bias exists. (Fence Sitter, via email)
Dear Fence Sitter, oh dear oh dear.
We have been accused of being partisan many times in the past. Curiously, we have been accused by opposition supporters of being pro-government, and by government supporters as being pro-opposition. Perhaps that in itself shows that we are, in fact, non-partisan.
If you have been reading the blawg, you will know that we are a community blawg.
Anyone and everyone can write, about anything. The pieces on the blawg do tend to be more pro-opposition than pro-government, but that is because of the posts received, not because of any censorship or filtering on our part. Please ask your pro-government friends to submit their posts to us, and we will definitely publish them. Point them to https://www.loyarburok.com/relationship.