The Rise of Mediacracy- answer to Uppercaise's High and Mighty

I know that all of you here instinctively understand the responsibility to report what you see accurately, and to inform your audience without prejudice.       Kim Il Najib.

When Mas and Air Asia were about to get into bed together, the boss of Khazanah and the short-tenured deputy CEO of MAS called up a few bloggers for a briefing. The meeting was held at a suite in KL Hilton. There was only one objective: to enlighten a group of supposedly overly critical bloggers to see it their way- that the marriage of convenience between MAS and Air Asia then was good. We all know what eventually happened.

After the meeting, for a brief time the bloggers and practitioners of the new media  sung praises about the short-lived one night stand between the two airlines. Bloggers who would otherwise be scathing about what Azman Mokhtar and his boys in Khazanah are doing were suddenly appreciative about what the Collaboration meant and wrote of the unholy union between the two as being the best thing to happen in the aviation industry. The engagement and disengagement made some people behind the scenes very rich.  Not bad for people who say, they do not know anything about the airline industry and served merely as a matchmaker.

When Felda wanted to list its FGV, it also enlisted the help of some bloggers and paid them handsomely to sing praises and lullabies to the gullible Malaysian public.  They were of course joined by the  the mainstream media with their tentacled grip on the Malaysian psyche.

I was reading the piece written by Uppercaise in his blog about the sordid affairs that are taking place within mediadom. I withdrew from the reading, unsurprised.

It has come to this. Our world is subjected to a one of the most dangerous threat to our democracy. It’s called mediacracy. A world controlled and shaped by 'respectable journalist'- those self-appointed crusaders of truth and fighters of the cause to create an informed public.   

That’s the idea speechified by the parroting PM in the opening remarks to this article.  This was what Uppercase wrote about what Kim Il Najib did.

Najib Tun Razak made his fourth annual insulting appearance before the establishment media last Wednesday at the NPC press awards night, the second of two annual festivals of self-congratulation. Keeping up his administration’s style, there was more bombast from the prime minister to provide a fine hand-polished gloss over the mean and vicious vindictiveness in his party and in the nomenclatura of his shambolic government and the party’s loyal cadre of right-wing attack dogs. For the fourth year running, his speech at a press awards night dealt with the noblest principles and aims of journalism and free media — most of which, in practice, the establishment media either willfully ignore or subvert, either on instruction or out of self-preservation.

Perhaps Uppercase meant nomenclitura ( clit replaces the clat) which should be a more fitting description of what Najib is doing.

Just what is mediacracy is all about?  It refers to the tangled webs of back-channel contacts and hidden power relations connecting senior politicians and the so called top journalists, helped along by public relations agencies, lobbyists and other figures of public contrivance. Suddenly we have full advertisements of “we choose Malaysia displaying photographs of journalistic quacks of the old and new media”.

What have these people done? One is more famously known for his cock teasing or clit teasing few lines of barren writings and others more known for the evangelizing diatribes and vitriolic attacks on those who refused to be cowed by their version of events. Mediacracy has been gaining ground for some time in virtually all democracies. They have only one aim. To hoodwink citizens.

How did mediacracy happen?

The government of Kim Il Najib as with many popularly elected governments are today proactively engaged in clever, cunning struggles to kidnap their clients and citizens mentally through the manipulation of appearances, with the help of accredited journalists and other public relations curators. The age of organized political contrivance is upon us.

If you were to give Najib a written assignment he will piously write these lines on journalists:- Journalists are vital translators and communicators of their words and deeds to audiences of citizens. They attract and hold the attention of busy people, helping them to understand what politicians are saying and doing. They can of course do politicians a big favor by helping convince citizens that their representatives are doing an excellent job, sometimes by singing lullabies to citizens who, for a time, politically sleepwalk their way through daily life. Or journalists can function as early warning detectors, even as triggers of political scandals with the power to unseat individual representatives, or to bring whole governments crashing to the ground.

That’s the theory of journalism and democracy, seen from a functionalist perspective and liked by Najib.

In practice, the dalliance of journalists and high-level politics is always contingent. Journalists and politicians drink and dine together. They bump into each other at gatherings, in shopping malls, airports and school grounds, and at formal functions. They frisk and frolic and keep in touch; sometimes they share beds. Their working habits coincide. They think about similar things and talk to the same people, often in tight circles of friends, sources, advisors, colleagues and former colleagues. They do as people say, inside baseball (as Americans say) with an often bizarre assortment of inside players. This is simply a metaphor describing how politicians and journalists herding together, pakkuat together, hoodwink the public.

Sometimes the dalliance results in iron-clad oligarchy, where members of their exclusive clubs enjoy privileged access not just to politicians but also to government ministries, political parties, businesses, even the Palaces.  Nevermind our security is threatened- the military sees nothing wrong to invite apparatchiks to board our submarines and make avalilable to them military information.

How do we explain, how mediacracy has become successful and flourishing?  The answer lies mainly in that its beneficiaries quickly sense that they have an interest in preserving their own privileges, hence they do everything to hang on to their power, even if that means sacrificing personal integrity, investigative reporting and other conventional standards of high-quality journalism. What happens then? When that dynamic sets in, journalists undermine their own authority. The public  disbelieve them because at the end of the day, journalists are judged to be dissemblers, careless confabulators and liars.

This is where Kim Il Najib comes in. he justifies all the hypocrisy of mediacracy  as an instrument to create the “informed citizen” and calls for a new politics and journalism based on “reality” and “facts”. Such as the hollow sincerity displayed in his opening remarks above. So we say to Najib, If only things were so simple.

As the poet Kafka says, “truth” has many faces.

Here is the problem and our distrust. The problem with mediacracy is not that it suppresses “true” pictures of “reality” that should otherwise be plain for all to see; it is that mediacracy hinders the circulation of other, different, equally plausible pictures of reality that are so vital for making meaningful judgments about the great complexity of the world around us.

In the age of monitory democracy, appeals to “reality journalism” and the “informed citizen” are both outdated and too timid. What’s needed, for the sake of democracy against mediacracy, are new arguments for open systems of communication and the free flow of different points of view.

So the reason why mediacracy is bad for democracy is that it stifles bold, courageous speech aimed at the powerful. We need countervailing and opposite forces that don’t shy away from indulging in fearless “wild thinking” and untamed conjectures that are unwedded to slavish talk of “reality” and “truth”.

In matters of public life and politics, fearless sense-making reports about the world are the best weapon we have for countering the risks and dangers of folly and arrogance, bossing and bullying.

From the point of view of courageous journalism, mediacracy is meekness and mediocrity. In matters of government, it is malfeasance and malefaction.

Our objective is to make citizens into wise citizens. This is essential and vital for democracy. Democracy is an unending experiment in taming hazardous concentrations of power. It needs wise citizens who know they don’t know everything, but who suspect those who think they do, especially when they try to camouflage their arrogant will to power over others.

We have to be weary of these journalists because these know-alls who share beds with politicians who wield power normally protect their flanks by means of deception.

That’s why their humbling through continuous public scrutiny is imperative. And why, where it exists, mediacracy must be broken up, through enquiries unafraid of tackling tough questions and challenging every proposition they make. By enabling the production of communication with spine, democracy is a way of humbling the powerful, rendering them publicly accountable to citizens and their representatives, sometimes by forcing them to own up, or even to step down.