> By now a nationwide boycott of two mainstream national newspapers ( New Straits Times and Utusan Malaysia ) and one commercial television channel (TV3) has begun in Malaysia. This boycott has been organised and orchestrated by the leaders of several opposition parties, civic organisations and NGOs, and is intended to last until April 2000.

In the weeks and months to follow, the Malaysian public will be able to judge for themselves the effectiveness of this passive campaign of civil protest. It is estimated that the losses that will be suffered by these newspapers and TV channels might go up to millions of ringgit, which in turn will be translated into drops in sales and revenue, advertising, loss of jobs and perhaps even closure of companies.

That such a boycott could have come at a time like this must be a blow for many of those who argue that the Malaysian economy is on a rebound and that the political crisis that was sparked by the sacking, arrest and detention of the ex-deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim was a thing of the past.

Now it looks like the mainstream media of the country may well be put on the 'endangered species' list as well. This is hardly surprising, for over the past few months the Malaysian public has been treated to a gallery of gaffs and blunders that would make the sinking of the Titanic seem like a case of bad plumbing:

- A prominent Malaysian Chinese-language daily was exposed when it featured a doctored photograph of some prominent politicians of the dominant UMNO party at a previous party conference.

It was later proven that the photograph was actually doctored and that a key politician - the former deputy prime minister no less - had been 'wiped off' and his image replaced with another. The editors of the newspaper later admitted that the 'mistake' was theirs and accepted that the blunder had cost the paper's credibility dearly.

- Another Malaysian newspaper had embarked on a massive and expensive revamp of its image and operations in a desperate bid to improve its image and standing with the Malaysian public. But just when the operation was completed, it was announced that its editor was removed from his post and asked to take an 'extended vacation'. After receiving the golden kris in the back, it was obvious to everyone that the editor had been fired, all but in name only.

Thus it became clear to the more jaded sections of the Malaysian public that despite the cosmetic changes to the newspaper, the underlying agenda had not changed at all and that the same people at the top were still pulling the strings.

- On another occasion, mysterious 'phantom' copies of the Islamist opposition party's newspaper materialised shortly before the previous elections. The leaders of the opposition claimed that these 'phantom' issues contained misleading information and was part of an orchestrated campaign to discredit the opposition parties.

- An even bigger surprise has been the meteoric rise of the Islamist opposition party's official newspaper, Harakah . Once thought of as the staple diet for middle-income rural and urban Malays, the paper can now be seen everywhere: from Chinese coffee-shops to that trendy 'den of sin' known as Bangsar.

Harakah

's circulation before the crisis was around the 70,000 mark, but it has now reached a peak of 300,000. The fact that the newspaper for the Islamic opposition party can reach such levels in sales is a testimony to the simple fact that the people there must be doing something right.

A similar situation occurred in the late 80s when, in the wake of the government's anti-opposition crackdown dubbed 'Operation Lalang', the sales of the magazine Aliran Monthly (published by the NGO Aliran) reached unprecedented levels and managed to challenge the dominance of the mainstream press.

Against this backdrop of rapid social change and upheaval, the powers-that-be can be seen and heard chanting the same litany of 'opposition lies' and 'rumours' to bring down the economy or undermine the integrity of the state. One cannot help but wonder if such claims actually reach their mark, and whether they actually produce the effect that is intended of them.

The country's leaders can only go on to a limited extent claiming that the Malaysian public is 'stupid' and 'ignorant' and that they are fools because they refuse to buy the mainstream newspapers and choose instead to read the alternative press. If these alternative and opposition newspapers are indeed full of lies all the time, common sense alone would tell us that people would stop buying them.

We therefore need to put the present state of affairs in its proper context in order to understand just how and why we now find ourselves in a situation where the most glossy, flashy, trendy and upbeat publications of the mainstream media are losing out to these low-budget newspapers and periodicals from the alternative fringe.

Root of the problem: No truth in the mainstream

Malaysia is a country with many open secrets. Perhaps one day we might even build a museum dedicated to these bits and pieces of informal knowledge and information. One of the biggest open secrets of all is the fact that the mainstream press in the country is controlled by powerful economic and commercial interests linked to the dominant parties of the ruling National Front coalition.

This is something that most Malaysians have been able to live with for some time, for the simple reason that we are not naive children who still believe in notions of an ideal world. The Malaysian public is mature enough to know and expect that some of the news will invariably have a spin to it and that editors and broadcasters can be 'economical' with the truth.

However, it must be stated that the Malaysian public has grown increasingly tired and weary of the extent to which this ownership and control over the mainstream media manifests itself, and the ways through which it can affect the quality of the goods and services being rendered.

When the more over-zealous and subservient among these editors and broadcasters go out of their way to distort facts and misrepresent reality to the extent of doctoring photographs, misquoting members of the opposition, lifting quotes out of context ad nauseam, denying the right of reply to the opposition, misrepresenting the claims of the opposition and so on, then at once the limit is bound to be reached. In the case of the Malaysian mainstream media, this invisible frontier has been crossed some time way back.

The first thing that the dominant parties and interests within the ruling coalition should have done in the wake of the recent elections was to admit to their own blunders and failings, and to begin the painful yet necessary process of cleaning up their own house.

The confrontational and biased approach of some of the mainstream newspapers should have been checked and efforts should have been made to ask their own readers the simple question of why they had decided to abandon the newspapers and TV channels that they were reading and watching all these years.

Under such circumstances, a drop in the sales of the NST , Utusan and other mainstream newspapers seems to be the most likely and rational outcome as most sensible adults prefer to read and think for themselves instead of being told what to believe by others. Most ordinary people would prefer to live with the illusion that the news they read is fair, objective and unbiased.

Furthermore, contrary to the paranoid warnings of the leadership of the country, most people actually seem to prefer to hear several sides of the story and to make their own judgements accordingly. That this commonsensical fact is universal knowledge to all is clear when we compare the performance of the mainstream Malaysian media with that of the foreign press.

While Malaysians may be wary of the Eurocentric biases and agendas that are patently evident in the reportage they get from the newspapers like The Times , International Herald Tribune , The Wall Street Journal or channels like BBC or CNN, the managers and producers of these Western channels are at least intelligent enough to realise that they need to appear fair and balanced in their reporting at least. Such considerations have been totally absent in the case of the mainstream Malaysian press.

In comes the marginal press: Harakah enters the mainstream

In Malaysia we have seen how the local mainstream media has been abandoned by tens of thousands of Malaysians. These Malaysians are themselves ordinary consumers - they are not necessarily members of the opposition or supporters of any political party or faction. They happen to be ordinary consumers of news and media services who are fed up with being sold a botched product by people who do not seem to understand or appreciate the sensibilities and sensitivities of their intended audience.

As Malaysians abandoned the newspapers and regular channels of information they have been using in the past, new contenders have come to the fore. Sales of the Islamic party newspaper Harakah soared as members of the Malaysian public craved to know the other side of the story. Malay language magazines like Tamaddun , Detik and others also began selling very well.

What surprises many people is how a conservative newspaper like Harakah could appeal to so many Malaysians who have been brought up on a diet of pre-digested sensational news and gossip. The newspaper does not feature 'pretty girls' (one can hardly imagine a Harakah equivalent of the Malay Mail 's 'page 3 beauty'), beauty tips, fashion news or the latest on sports

cars and other consumerist junk - yet it sells.

While the political leadership of the country is understandably angry and worried about this latest turn in events, few political analysts and commentators have cared to comment on the present state of affairs and its most likely consequences for the immediate future. For now, some tentative observations can be made:

Firstly, it must be remembered that Malaysian politics being divided along ethnic and religious lines as it is, the boycott will invariably have an uneven effect. The opposition parties are calling for the boycott of the English-language daily New Straits Times , the Malay daily Utusan Malaysia and the commercial channel TV3.

While it is difficult to say clearly to what extent the non-Malay communities support the opposition parties in the country, it is obvious to most observers that the reformasi movement that has sprung up as a result of the political crisis in the country is predominantly supported by the Malays.

The net outcome of the proposed boycott would therefore be an even bigger drop in sales of the NST and Utusan while an even greater number of disaffected Malay-Muslims will be turning to the opposition press and Harakah in particular.

Should this be the case, we will therefore be in a situation where one of the best-selling and widely read newspapers in the country would be that of the Islamist opposition party. It must be said that as a party-political newspaper, Harakah is also guilty of the same vices and foibles that it accuses its competitors of: Namely, giving coverage to PAS politicians and leaders, constantly bashing the record of the UMNO-led government and pushing its own Islamist agenda on the readership.

In this respect, the premier alternative newspaper in the country at the moment seems to share many embarrassingly similar characteristics with its nemesis, NST and Utusan .

At present, the new readers to Harakah seem able and willing to forgive the editors of the newspaper for these failings as they have grown so tired of the more established newspapers in the country. But this will not alter the fact that Harakah is just as political a newspaper as NST or Utusan (some would argue that it is even more political and biased in its reportage) and that such an approach does not necessarily contribute to the creation of a free and independent press in a democratic country.

Harakah

's followers may well claim that NST and Utusan are biased in their coverage of news and that these mainstream newspapers have slavishly consented to serve as propaganda vehicles for certain UMNO and BN politicians. This, however, is something that Harakah is also guilty of - the evidence of which can be found in the unremitting coverage and publicity it gives to the leaders of PAS in every issue.

Secondly, this development will also alter the socio- cultural and political landscape of the country in no uncertain terms. If the main alternative newspaper in the country is to be one that is politically Islamist in tenor, what does it hold for the future?

The most probable outcome will be the increased Islamisation of Malaysian mainstream political culture. Already we have seen how popular political discourse in the country (in the Malay language at least) has been influenced by new pan-Islamist terms, metaphors and symbols that were previously unheard of: terms like Firaun , Qarun , zalim (unjust), jihad (Islamic struggle), mujahid (Muslim fighter), and others have become part and parcel of daily political writing and speech.

This is mainly the result of the overwhelming dominance of vernacular Malay political discourse and rhetoric in the political space of the country, and the rise of Harakah as the main alternative newspaper for the Malay-Muslim constituency will invariably add to this further.

But this significant shift in semantics and vocabulary is bound to have an effect on perceptions and understandings of politics by ordinary Malaysians. The use of such pseudo-religious discourse has both positive as well as negative effects in the way that it both includes and excludes various ethnic and political constituencies simultaneously.

To talk of the present political crisis as a ' jihad against the forces of kafir (non-believer) and kezaliman (injustice)' may well strike a chord with some sections of the Malay-Muslim community, but it also risks the danger of excluding others who do not share (or do not want to share) that kind of religious-political discourse.

Conclusion: Still a need for free and independent media .

To conclude, it could be argued that the present boycott of the mainstream media in the country was not only expected, but almost necessary considering the extent to which the mainstream media has allowed itself to be utilised for political ends. But one must also point out that the rise of the opposition media does not necessarily mean that the media in the country is now more free or independent than before.

From what we can see at the moment it is clear that the rise of the 'alternative' media has merely opened the way for a form of opposition dialectics where both sides of the political frontier accuse the other of lies and slander. In such a situation, the Malaysian public is still waiting to be served news that is free of ideological agendas and party-political propaganda.

One lesson that has yet to be learnt by both the mainstream and opposition press in the country is that the reading and viewing public is not made up of passive consumers of information or misinformation. Despite the cynicism of politicians, ordinary people are endowed with rational agency and intelligence, and are therefore able to judge for themselves what is right and true.

The mainstream and opposition media must therefore be brave and honest enough to provide news that is worthy of the name: news that is balanced, objective and constructively critical. The first side that realises this will be the one that wins the battle for the hearts and minds of the Malaysian public.

Dr. FARISH A NOOR is a political scientist and historian who has studied the development of Malay political culture and is currently working on the historical development of the Malaysian Islamic Party and other Islamist movements. He is also the Secretary-General of the International Movement for a Just World. The views expressed here are entirely his own.