Can't say that I understand the fuss surrounding the apparent bias of malaysiakini . To be honest, it's not a new issue... many ex-journo friends of mine have maintained that all along.

Right they are, too. For malaysiakini is undoubtably biased.

But that's just it, isn't it? What newspaper is not? When the reporter from The Star intimated to Shahrir Abdul Samad that perhaps malaysiakini has an 'agenda', was she insinuating that her newspaper doesn't (Different folks, different strokes, Dec 11)?

If so, then I may have received the wrong training when I was a young reporter. Because the main reason my stories kept making their way back to me was due to one simple reason: There was no angle.

And guess what? That "angle" depends on the agenda of the newspaper.

Every newspaper (or rather, every good one) has an agenda. It is their reason for being. A newspaper without an agenda is like a ship without compass. Like a beautiful woman without a soul.

And a neutral newspaper is a boring newspaper, like cheese without flavour. It might as well not exist at all. Who wants to read explosive stories ensconced in polite, politically correct terms?

After all, a news organisation is run by people, and people are opinionated. So that's not the real problem.

No, the problem lies not in the bias of a newspaper. The problem is when people do not realise how a newspaper is biased.

The reason is simple. Many people tend to take whatever is written as the gospel truth. They like to let someone else do the thinking for them. This passive internalisation of news is what's dangerous, because they are essentially giving other people permission to shape their minds.

Hence, the lack of a counterbalance means they will swallow one-sided dogma hook, line and stinker (just like in the pre-Internet days, remember?).

So, by leaning one way, malaysiakini serves to balance the many more print versions that quite heavily (and quite blatantly) lean the other way. This, after all, is how newspapers in the UK are organised; you always know who is rooting for the government and who is not. Read them both, and you'll get a clearer picture of what's going on. But that having been said, malaysiakini has no business berating its counterparts for not being 'good' journalists. Because they 'are' doing their jobs. It's just that their agenda is different from yours.