Media Globalization and Digital Journalism in Malaysia by Amira Firdaus

Author:Amira Firdaus [Firdaus, Amira]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781317204213
Google: if0wDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-08-15T02:03:10+00:00

Global Al Jazeera English (AJE) going glocal in Malaysia

In addition to Malaysian local alternative media, global media has also been credited with facilitating political transformation of Malaysia’s political and mainstream media spheres. In particular Al Jazeera English (AJE) and its reporting of a major rally calling for electoral reform on November 10, 2007 and another rally two weeks later by Hindu activists, is believed to have impacted on the electoral outcome in the country’s March 2008 General Elections (Carter, 2008; McDaniel, 2008; Pedrosa, 2008; Powers & El-Nawawy, 2008). Although the ruling coalition, Barisan Nasional, won the General Elections, the elections is also seen as a win for the political opposition because it was able to wrestle away the two-thirds majority that the ruling coalition had continuously won in every election since the country gained independence from British colonial rule in 1957.

Local mainstream media covered these rallies using a public disorder news frame emphasizing the damage that protestors had caused to property, its negative impact on local businesses, and the inconvenience caused to motorists. In contrast, AJE focused on these rallies’ call for democracy, criticized the state’s arrests of protest leaders and its use of water cannons and tear-gas to disperse protestors, and highlighted what it perceived to be the government’s “indignant” defense of its actions and “inarticulate” attack of the channel’s purportedly biased reporting (see McDaniel, 2008; Pedrosa, 2008; Powers & El-Nawawy, 2008).

AJE exemplifies what Hallin and Mancini (2004) would describe as a “professional model” of broadcasting in which news broadcasters are “insulated from political control and run by broadcasting professionals” (p. 31). As a foreign international media organization, AJE’s Kuala Lumpur broadcast center was somewhat insulated from Malaysian state control.

According to Powers and el-Nawawy (2008), the channel’s coverage of these rallies gave rise to an “Al Jazeera effect” wherein its critical reporting not only undermined government credibility and bolstered support for the political opposition, but also bore implication for local media treatment of the story. Quoting an interview participant from their study, Powers and el-Nawawy note that the global channel’s coverage “provides cover” for both alternative and mainstream medias to report more openly on the protests and the issues behind them (p. 78). State-affiliated news outlets found it difficult to report the news solely from the government perspective and still retain audiences, when its reporting is challenged by more compelling content in the form of AJE footage and the “sphere of magnified attention” (Volkmer, 2008) created by local blogosphere’s viral redistribution of the global channel’s coverage (Pedrosa, 2008). To the extent that this Al Jazeera effect exists, the global news channel’s impact on Malaysian politics and media suggests that it performs a “critical change agent” (Hanitzsch, 2011) role similar to that of local alternative media.

Here, it should be mentioned that AJE’s coverage of these rallies were in part facilitated by the fact that the channel’s Asia base of operations is located in Kuala Lumpur. Up until the network’s global restructuring in 2011, AJE also maintained a broadcast center in Kuala Lumpur along with its three other broadcast centers in Doha, Washington D.

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