It was reported that, during a meeting between the editorial staff and the columnists and writers of malaysiakini , the editor declared the comments section to be the soul of malaysiakini .

I was touched.

There was a time when the first thing I did in the morning was to log on the Internet and read the commentary section on the British Guardian Unlimited . In case you forgot, that was where the late great columnist Hugo Young left an indelible mark on British journalism. Every article written by Karen Armstrong on faith and religion was eagerly awaited, devoured, and stored away.

News form the skeleton of journalism, but columns, commentaries, and the letters to the editors should form the flesh and blood of every news organisation. If news items are the raw materials, the staple fare for a community to imagine themselves as members belonging to a larger world out there, then a columnist's observation of occurances in the public domain provides the tentative interpretations and analysis of those events.

News deal with facts, the five W's, whereas commentaries try to excavate the meaning of the facts so reported and revealed to the world. The two are mutually complementary.

The most important commentary in the British broadsheets is the leader, or what we call the editorial. It states the position of the particular paper on any major issue of the day. Leader writers enjoy the kind of prestige and remuneration that their counterparts in Malaysia can only dream of.

Who reads them?

Who reads the editorials in the Malaysian press anyway? After all, we all know the editorial policy of all newspapers in Malaysia, they all support the ruling coalition. As for the opposition papers - like the Harakah and the Rocket , they are hardly newspapers in the orthodox sense. They are party organs, and if they have any editorial policy, it is that they all support the opposition, and oppose all Barisan Nasional policies. They are the mirror image of the BN oppressed press.

The usefulness of the political commentator was amply demonstrated by the BBC World Service.

The BBC has gone through great changes since the 60s, when I first followed their programmes on their short wave radio broadcast. Even now, they are besieged with problems, not least of which was their tussle with the Blair government in trying to cling to their independence.

Fortunately, we can watch BBC World News on Astro now. There was a time when Malaysians could not watch BBC on the television, because the government at that time thought their programmes too dangerous for our very sensitive multi-racial society.

If you watch their world news nowadays, you will notice that, after each item on the headline stories has been read, a commentator will be invited to give his or her analysis. The commentator could be somebody involved in the event, or some member of a think tank group, or someone with expertise or have studied extensively about the issue at hand.

They give you the background, reveal the forces behind the event and provide different interpretations to the meaning of the story. They 'flesh out' the news.

The distinctive policy of the BBC was to give fair airing to views from all sides. The plurality of views might make the audience more confused and uncertain. But it provides them with freedom of choice, in forming their own informed, rounded and thoughtful conclusions.

(I notice malaysiakini is trying to promote this sort of balanced journalism, especially in the letters to the editors. The tolerance level of the editors for junk is incredibly high.)

I am not much of an Anglophile, although I do love English literature with a passion. But The Brits have a few centuries head-start over Malaysia in evolving into a thriving democracy; the Westminster was not called the Mother of Parliaments for nothing. We could do very well to learn from their excesses as well as their success.

Back home in Malaysia, there is a dearth of good commentators, who can both write well and stimulate thoughtfulness. I suppose one can also claim that there is a dearth of good readers who can nurture good writers.

Lonely business

Writing is essentially a lonely business. You stare at the blank fluorescent screen of your computer monitor, and squeeze the last bit of your inspiration from your grey matter. The deadline is approaching, and you are confronted with a writers block the size of Mount Everest. I bump into this sort of intellectual constipation once every three months.

Then there are all kinds of distracting contingencies of daily living. The creditors are yelping at your heels. The cat is sick. A poor relative has come to stay. The phone keeps ringing with no cheerful messages to lift your spirit. Then the computer breaks down, as computers want to do so often.

Eventually, the piece of writing is completed somehow, a rush job naturally, and never satisfactory to the perfectionist writer. With a click of the mouse, the precious product of your love labour is sent into anonymous cyber-space, to be read by equally anonymous God-knows-who inhabiting cyber-reality.

I started three years ago with articles of indeterminate lengths. The editor advised me to keep it within 1,500 words. Having been starved of the opportunity for free expression all of one life in Malaysia, one is tempted by the availability of this freedom on malaysiakini to pour out one's heart.

But alas, the Malaysian readers attention span is limited, like a child . Besides, reading political comments on the computer screen is torture on the eyes anyway. For myself, I prefer a book any time of the day. So I keep every one of my article to 1,500 words, give or take 50 words.

Then there is a matter of style to consider. I was too much influenced by Farish Noor at first. Some readers began to complain that my stuff, though of some interest, was too academic. Nowadays, the label of being too academic is a kiss of death for writers writing for a mass audience.

I remembered Chiam Toon Lee, a friend and one time editor of the Borneo Post in the 80s. He said he trained his reporters to write their stories with a vocabulary of 500 English words. By that criterion, Rehman Rashid would fail miserably. I also remember my secondary English lessons from my La Salle Brothers in Kuching - 'simplicity is elegance'. The problem is with interpreting what constitutes simplicity of style. I still hate Hemmingway.

Then there is the ambiguity of tonality. Given the freedom provided by malaysiakini , anyone who is less than enamoured with the government tends to adopt the style first made popular by Lim Kit Siang in the 70s - combative, confrontational, and abrasive, mostly damning, and packed with powerful rhetoric and superlatives.

Perhaps, I have been overtly influenced by my experience in the study of philosophy, especially in the philosophy of logos, language, discourse, and communication.

To the postmodernists, discourse is but power speaking in the historical process of producing and reproducing of truth. This is obvious in our Malaysian public space. The media that forms public opinion is an uneven battlefield for warriors engaged in a battle of sheer will power and truth. Might makes right, and the BN reigns supreme in shaping consciousness. Public opinion is but private prejudices writen in bold.

Counter productive

Jorgen Habermas has also another idea. The purpose of discourse, he says, is not merely persuasion, but also to reach a consensus of sort in genuine communication, and so dialogues are guided by the ethics of inter-subjective speech acts.

The Hermeneutics, epitomised by the works of Gadamer, follows the advice from Martin Heidegger that language is the abode of being, whatever that means. Language can reveal the truth, but in doing so, it often hides other truths. Genuine communication must leave the participants in a dialogue open to wider horizons. A good chat can set you free.

Therefore, the sort of radicalism that is often expressed in malaysiakini can be counter-productive. The cyber-world in which malaysiakini thrives is a big virtual universe, inhabited by all kinds of digital creatures. It is tempting to just address oneself to the converts and fellow brings who travel that same road. It is also a good idea that perhaps one ought to speak to the pagans and the undecided. Endless antam will exclude the unbelievers.

My theories do not always work out in practice. I have discovered that we do have a problem in communication. From e-mail responses to my articles, it is obvious that such ordinary literary techniques as sarcasm, ironies, allusions, and allegories are lost on some keen readers. In the flat vacant landscape that is the Malaysian mind, people tend to read only into the literal meaning of words and sentences, and arrive at an understanding that is the exact opposite intended by the writer. In one instance, my sarcastic remark on Pak Lah was misunderstood to be a compliment to the PM.

So far, my severest critics tend to be young people, who label me and my writing as negative, pessimistic and un-constructive.

What my critics fail to realise is that those labels they bandy about are precisely the tools with which the residents of our world of modernity have been enslaved. Without freeing ourselves from the bondage of the language of power, we cannot even begin to have a dialogue and enjoy the fruits of authentic existence.

Therefore, I plead guilty to all those trumped-up charges. After all, my job as Nietzsche would say is to make my audience uncomfortable.