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It was amusing in an agonising kind of way to read recently that the Umno/BN regime’s Deputy Home Minister Nur Jazlan Mohamed chose to celebrate World Press Freedom Day by claiming in a radio interview that Malaysiakini is a “very biased” media outlet.

Because, though of course he allegedly had no intention of telling the truth, in fact quite the opposite, his assertion was perfectly accurate in one unintended sense.

Which is that, as far as I’ve been able to discern during the 18 years of existence, Malaysiakini is totally biased towards doing its duty as a disseminator of accurate information to its audience by reporting the news faithfully, or, as famously stated by the great Adolph Ochs when he took charge of The New York Times in 1896, without fear or favour.

And thus by implication Malaysiakini is also, as any legitimate news organisation must be, similarly biased against the systematic censorship, skewing and indeed outright screwing of the truth by such fake ‘news’ organisations as Umno/BN’s so-called ‘mainstream’ media.

A system of organised deception so deplorable that it has resulted in Malaysia’s being ranked a decidedly rank 144th place in the latest world press-freedom report released by the widely-trusted news-media watchdog Reporteurs Sans Frontières (RFS).

But Nur Jazlan, having branded Malaysiakini as “biased” against the ruthlessly truthless regime he represents, had the effrontery to go on to accuse RFS of being “unfair” in giving Malaysia such a lamentably low ranking.

Claiming in support of this allegation that RFS focused on print rather than online media in its assessments of relative press freedom, and citing the fact that Malaysia rates a mere five places above “totalitarian” China as evidence for his contention that “the index is fraudulent in many ways”.

While for my part I would argue, entirely to the contrary, that Malaysia’s depressing press-freedom ranking is not only a richly-deserved disgrace in and of itself, but also by extension an index of the utter fraudulence of every facet of the nation’s ever-ruling Umno/BN regime.

But of course it’s entirely predictable that I’d use this column to thus calumniate Umno/BN’s corruptions and countless other ‘criminalities’.

Indeed, by the very act of publishing my opinions, albeit with the customary legal disclaimer that it doesn’t necessarily share or endorse them, Malaysiakini demonstrates that its bias is not only towards the impartial reporting of true news, but also by extension in favour of the healthy airing and exchanging of views.

Views that, to speak entirely of my own, are as biased as they can possibly be. But genuinely, legitimately, justly and truly biased, I hope, on the basis of compelling evidence or careful consideration or both...

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