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- Editor]

I wrote this on 31 July 01, when my computer was incommunicado with the world.

It is Terrible, These Foreigners, Who Misreport!

The New Straits Times foreign editor is livid at the misreporting he alleges from Jakarta in the runup to President Megawati Sukarnoputri taking office. The Western foreign correspondents and reporters did their reporting from bars in five-star hostleries, and dramatised the confusion in Jakarta. He writes in his "Diplomatic Crossroads" column in the New Straits Times (30 July 01, p10) that his contacts in Jakarta told him of the exaggerated reporting. His best source is the NST reporter on the spot who curiously did not write of this in his reports. This is a serious accusation which he cannot back up. Yet, he, as foreign editor, encouraged his paper to carry the "untrue" reports of these whisky-swilling reporters who presumably manufacture the stories from the bars in Jakarta and elsehwere. If they were inaccurate, why did he insist of giving them the prominence the paper gave it?

The New Straits Times has men and women in other areas of the world, but all we get out of them are weekly social diaries, usually rehashed stories from the hated Western newspapers or of meetings with Malaysian worthies. Why are we not given a Malaysian perspective of world events? Why do they only spring to life when a minor cabinet minister turns up in his bailliwick? If space and funds were a problem, then a weekly letter on the country he reports, not a rehash but from personal observation, than to be entertained by a pastiche of what the newspapers about an irrelevant person, which the newspaper, in any case, had carried much earlier. If I were a Malaysian foreign editor, I would insist regular coverage from reporters in foreign climes of events in his bailliwick to be carried in the next day's edition. Here, they are discouraged from doing so. Why?

The Jakarta man-on-the spot should have stood up and be counted, writing the truth as he saw it. He did not. Why not? What happened to the pool coverage that Asian news agencies were to provide? Why did he not write about the misreporting when it occurred, instead of relaying his comments to his foreign editor for a blanket attack on Western reporters? It showed, if nothing else, the professionalism, or the lack of it, of the two men. I hold no brief for Western reporters, but when I do travel widely to distant spots -- yes, troubled ones, too! -- the Malayian reporters, where they exist, were adjuncts to the local information and news agency office. You got little help, either for a rundown of what has happened or how to get to a particular place of trouble as cheaply as possible. It is always the foreign reporter, usually freelancers as I, who comes in to help. And I would them when they turn up in Kuala Lumpur.

A fresh look turns up stories the residents would miss. And that is what I look for. Yes, I, a teetotaller, have spent hours in bars and lesser reputable places, drinking lime juice or Coca Cola listening to journalistic gossip, picking up pointers for stories I could work on. This is why, where possible, I check into hotels where journalists gravitate. It does not mean I accept what they say, and I have written stories that annoyed them. But that is how it moves. Most earn a living as freelances.

Whether newspapers I work for overseas have an agenda of their own, to destroy Dr Mahathir, as Malaysian newspapers allege, or is against global warming, is not my concern: I am a footsoldier in the global news business, and I send my reports as I see it. Unlike many Asian newspapers I have written for, my reports are never "doctored"; and none have rejected a story because they did not like what I wrote or if it conflicted with its editorial position. I once had a full page story in The Times of the revival of the Sukarno legend, years after his death and when it was fashionable, even in that newspaper, to paint him a megalomaniac: the 400-word feature I proposed stretched, at the news editor's instance, to 1,500 words.

If the NST foreign editor wants to attack Western newspapers for its lapses, he should aim higher. Malaysian reporters in the bureaus of Malaysian newspapers behave, though not as boisterously, as their Western counterparts in the world's capitals. The camraderie amongst journalists keeps their sanity together and what they write is not to an agreed agenda decided elsewhere but from their own perception of what takes place; the Malaysian journalist, in Malaysia or overseas, has a further one to ensure political correctness which is why their reporting looks stilter and slanted.

Yet, Malaysian newspapers are more likely to carry the slanted Western reports than from either their own or Bername correspondents in distant countries. And since Malaysian television stations carried video footage of the problems in Jakarta, are we now to assume that they were fakes too? What happened in Jakarta is fact, quite possibly over- and melodramatised. But, as local reporters would tell you, so would they when faced with a similar situation in their own country, though this might be to show how rascally the opposition is.

The Western media is a sophisticated animal. There is much that is wrong with how it reports the world. I have written articles, published in magazines and newspapers in those countries, about it. It is not the footsoldiers who make the news media as powerful as it is. It is power, and globalisation's reach, that gives them the awesome power it has now. It makes no sense, other than cheap publicity, for attacks like these, for it also shows how naive the attackers are.