"Reporting is the bedrock of journalism, while columns seem more like the shifting sands of tide and fashion: undisciplined, unreliable, and possibly, in the basic scheme of things, unnecessary. Much of the point of columns is their transience. If the stuff is worth preserving longer, it is only, I think, as a form of reporting itself a tableau of a period and some of the issues that concerned it."

"There are two questions that have knocked around my head ever since I first began writing a political column. There is no clear-cut answer to either. But it seems important for a columnist to work out what he is doing on both counts. For whom, in the end, is he writing? And trickier still, on whom is he depending?

These words above were written by Hugo Young, in a Guardian column article entitled It is as an outsider that I write . Young, the towering figure in British journalism, died at age 64 from cancer on September 22, 2003.

Generally, journalists and column writers work for the media. They write the stories, and so are not meant to be the stories themselves. But the death of Hugo Young became a public event in England and in Europe.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair led a chorus of prominent voices from British and European public life in praise of Young's integrity, erudition and measured judgement. He said," I was very sad to hear of Hugo Young's death. He was someone of exceptional ability. He had the capacity to think originally, argue compellingly and carry conviction. And he was a genuinely nice human being. We will all miss him."

I gaped when I read these words from Blair, for I had long read Hugo Young, and had known him to be the arch critic of the powerful British prime minister.

For Young, Blair was the great British Promise that had turned sour. He had accused Blair of surrendering British sovereignty to the US for his unstinting support for President Bush during the Iraq invasion. In one of his last columns, he had called on Blair to resign, scornfully describing Blair as "master of pulpit philippic and courtroom defence".

In July this year, his call had seemed outlandish, but since then, the Kelly affair and the Hutton enquiry had proven Young to be more than prophetic. Recent polls have suggested that the British electorate have more confidence in the credibility of the BBC than the prime minister.

Young's abiding concern

Power, and the way it was exercised, was Hugo Young's abiding concern. "If the separation of journalism from politics doesn't mean journalists constantly challenging the extension of arbitrary authority, what is the point of not being a politician?" he wrote in the preface to his latest book, Supping With the Devils, Political writing from Thatcher to Blair.

Indeed, Young had been known to have lunched and supped with ministers, judges and senior mandarins. He did not write for the political class, but he could not avoid being read by them, from Downing Street to Whitehall. Nevertheless, he confessed to his lifelong inability to form any party political allegiance.

He had this to say about the seduction of power and his own sense of outsiderdom : "In recent years, however, more political journalists than ever have been happy to associate themselves with a political party or cause. I think there should be more austerity isn't journalism enough? So it's as the outsider that this columnist writes, paying whatever price that might entail by way of contact, engagement and agreeable illusion of being a player in the great game of government."

The last comment was the hallmark of Young's firm but fair detachment. He knew he had to criticise decisions made by government, without ever having to make them. Columnists and political commentators are not players, and they do not have the whole picture. It would be unfair for them to cast their moral thunderbolts from their rarefied Olympian heights as if they are above mere mortals.

Nevertheless, people used to complain about Young's Olympian tone. He once wrote a notorious sentence dismissing Neil Kinnock in terms of a poor honours degree from a lesser university a line he came to regret. We are all erring humans. Much as I check myself against the vanity of moral righteousness, I inevitably slip into that Olympian tone. It serves the useless partisan purpose of pleasing supporters and antagonising opponents.

The universe of the written word should have no national, geographical or historical barriers. Our political and literary landscape in Malaysia is vastly different from that in England and a strict comparison may not be easy. But there is sufficient family resemblance between the two cultures for us to pursue some common themes.

Two questions

So, in memory of Hugo Young, I am pondering upon his two questions: for whom am I writing? On whom, am I depending?

The question of an imagined audience is central to a writer's labour of love of course. After all, writing can be a lonely business. You stare at the blank wall, and imagine the background and the concerns of those faceless souls poring over your creation, while feeling grateful that you are given this rare privilege to participate on the production end - in this sometimes chaotic game of mass communication. With the power and the authoritativeness, comes a great deal of responsibility.

Inevitably, the question of the target audience is linked to the motivation factor that drives one to the tedious task of committing oneself to the printed words. One cannot write just for the sake of nihilistic monologic self-expression. This lonely world is filled with too many people speaking their minds, and too few people actually listening to other people's minds. Meaningful communication cannot be a mere transmission of information.

Here, the columnist's job is different from the news reporter. The reporter reports, and often disseminates the polemics and the rhetoric of politicians, whose job is to persuade and impose their worldview on the rest of the nation.

Strictly speaking, the reporter tells only half of the story. The columnist has to fill up the other half of the tale, dissecting what is commonly perceived as facts, and disentangling the spin that goes towards producing facts, fully aware that his is just one among many possible interpretations of the world.

Here, the first audience for the columnist is always the editor. A good columnist needs a good editor like a fish needs water. They should have a common vision, and a great deal of trust and mutual respect between them. For me, having written columns since the mid 80s, I have concluded that good editors are a rare if not dying breed.

The imagined audience also depends on the publication. The ideal audience will be the mass readership in the national dailies published in the various languages. But we all know about our national dailies, so we will leave it at that.

Fortunately, malaysiakini is an odd creature in Malaysian media. I suspect most, if not all, subscribers here will have a good part of their education in the English language, and they are probably multi-lingual. Judging from the feedback in the letters and opinion columns, the audience here is probably the cream of the crop when it comes to addressing an informed thoughtful readership.

Suffocating academia

In his article paying tribute to Hugo young and Edward Said, my friend Josh Hong laments the fact that we cannot find a Hugo Young in Malaysia. The political climate here certainly is not conducive to the survival and the flourishing of a Hugo Young, and our suffocating academia will certainly not tolerate an Edward Said.

More importantly, perhaps we do not yet have a mass readership that is capable of nurturing a Hugo Young or an Edward Said. I have been reminded by my malaysiakini editor to keep my article short, and my English readable, for we do live in a land of one-liners and limited attention spans. Apparently, thinking is a task too laborious for many Malaysians.

The great philosopher Nietzsche had written that his job is to make people uncomfortable. Mine is far less ambitious. I have no illusion that my pen (or computer) can be mightier than the sword that would bring regimes tumbling down. Neither is it my task to help the opposition come to power, for all political parties that seek power tend to be addicted to that quest, and so must be dissected with detachment as well.

My job is to add another drop of water to this small but fertile oasis of intellectual freedom, examine some of the predominant assumptions in our common life-world, explore the vague horizons for greater understanding among whoever cares to read my piece. In this, I depend on the goodwill and the need for understanding on the part of some Malaysians apart from the continued survival of malaysiakini.

It is as an outsider too, that I write.