The French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre once quipped: “Better a good journalist than a poor assassin”.

The unprecedented abject apology by the New Straits Times (NST) today on its third page shows it has indeed been a poor assassin.

The apology acknowledges the NST’s shockingly low standard of journalism, which has deteriorated far below that of the colonial times when it used to command a certain degree of credibility despite being an establishment paper.

Today it has sunk to a level of being the ruling party’s media assassin. And a poor assassin at that.

The NST’s patently gauche assassination attempt was launched on Sept 21, 2012 when it carried a front page story with the banner headline: “Ploy to destabilise govt”.

A few other NGOs were also implicated, namely Bersih 2.0, Centre for Independent Journalism (CIJ) and pollster Merdeka Centre, but clearly Suaram bore the brunt of that assault.

This story followed the BN government’s vindictive campaign against Suaram at a time when no less than six government agencies had been ordered to organise a posse against Suaram.

Everyone could see that it was payback time for Suaram having complained to the French courts to investigate the suspected commissions hidden in the more than RM7 billion Scorpene submarine deal.

After many months of relentless harassment of Suaram – orders for documents and calls for interrogation of Suaram personnel both past and present including one deceased (ie. Fan Yew Teng) – the six government agencies, including Companies Commission of Malaysia (CCM), Social Security Organisation (Perkeso) and Bank Negara were forced to admit that their allegations didn’t have a leg to stand on. In other words, we were found to be squeaky clean.

But despite the more than a hundred documents allegedly uncovered by the police investigations into the Scorpene scandal in Paris, no government agency appeared to be investigating all the reports about Perimekar Sdn Bhd, Terasasi and the suspected selling of national defence secrets and commissions paid in the Scorpene deal.

The order for Bank Negara to investigate Suaram for money laundering had its ironic moment when a person with funds for Sabah Umno were allegedly caught in the act with RM40 million by the Hong Kong police. We haven’t heard any more about the investigations into this.

The BN government’s “foreign plot” allegation has also blown up in their faces. The subsequent exposes of former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad and Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak’s recent close encounters with George Soros certainly embarrassed the media assassins.

Furthermore, by allowing nuclear-armed US warships to visit Port Klang soon after, the BN government has exposed their duplicitous foreign policy and raised the question of who the real US foreign agents are.

More recently, the Snowden expose has revealed that two CIA agents have been working in the government administration. So how did two foreign agents manage to infiltrate our government and shouldn’t heads roll for such indiscretion?

After such an ignominious day for one of Malaysia’s oldest newspapers, one can understand what Thomas Jefferson meant when he once said: “The most truthful part of a newspaper is the advertisements…”

DR KUA KIA SOONG is the director of human rights NGO Suara Rakyat Malaysia (Suaram).