Forget all those official assertions about Malaysian television being about "information", "education", and "entertainment", in that order. You'd get more information from the back of a cornflakes box and you'd certainly get more substantial education watching photographs on the Internet of judges and lawyers on holiday together.

Nope, Malaysian television really isn't about information or education. But all these years it sure as hell has been trying hard to be about propaganda and entertainment. As far as propaganda is concerned, the state-owned channels, TV1 and TV2, have been at it for eons, continuously churning out crude political propaganda which is often more laughable than anything else.

Many have since asserted that TV3 came into the picture in the mid-80s to handle the entertainment angle because the propaganda-saturated RTM channels had become dead boring. Initially this seemed to be the case, and Malaysians were indeed tuning in to TV3 for racy (by RTM standards) imported stuff.

But as the years passed by, TV3 began to take itself too seriously, believing it could be the thinking person's channel. It prided itself with its "Majalah 3" (a pale, local copy of America's "60 Minutes"), "Money Matters" and other, equally silly-looking "actuality" programmes whose "success" owed more to the Barbie dolls at their helm rather than to the quality of their content.

And because RTM's news programmes had long become dead boring, TV3 decided it was time to muscle in. To do so, it culled its news readers from credible places like airline companies, got them new wardrobes and decent make-up artists. So, voila, we now have wide-eyed, you guessed it, Barbie dolls reading the news.

And Malaysian audiences evidently have been lapping all this up, if television ratings are anything to go by. This too is not surprising, given that we've become a society where form overrides substance, where our attention span is as short as the time it takes for a judge to say "contempt of court".

With all these developments in "factual" programming, the lines between fact and fiction, information and entertainment, have been blurred. Indeed, a new term, "infotainment", was coined not so long ago to describe this new television genre. It's a term used, I guess, to define voyeuristic programmes like the original "Kisah Benar".

It is perhaps equally a term to describe more recent programmes like ntv7's "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?" (WWTBAM). After all, as one media writer has put it, WWTBAM "combines greed with intellect, fun with nail-biting suspense".

But I'm not so sure, though. What, for example, has intellect got to do with a question like: "Which of the following Gibb brothers was not a member of the Bee Gees?"

Let's face it - like "Roda Impian" and "Troli Monopoli", Malaysian TV's versions of "Wheel of Fortune" and "Supermarket Sweep", respectively, "WWTBAM" is basically about greed and nothing else.

Game shows like "WWTBAM" are reflective of a society that is becoming increasingly obsessed with the legal tender. They are also about companies sponsoring these shows being ever willing to exploit this obsession.

The sponsoring companies do this by, among other things, inviting viewers to call in to special numbers (which cost callers a bomb) to enable them to have a chance at winning oodles of ringgit.

They might call this interactive TV, but really, it is anything but. Being interactive is about genuinely empowering the audience, the citizens, to allow them to take control of the situation, to be part of society's decision-making processes, hence allowing them to genuinely take control of matters affecting their lives generally.

It isn't about conning the audience to part with their money in order to supposedly win a million ringgit.

Yeah, sure, it's fun. But too much of it - as in too much of game shows, sports programmes, soap operas and infortainment shows - results in television becoming over-commercialised and having very little variety.

This, in itself - this pandering to the advertising ringgit - should be seen by everyone as yet another form of censorship. It indeed prevents television - certainly Malaysian television - from experimenting with new forms and formats.

It stifles creativity; after all, it doesn't take much creativity to copy established, often Western, programmes, using the same style and props, as in the cases of "WWTBAM", "Roda Impian" and "Troli Monopoli".

More than that, the preponderance of television programmes like these, appealing as they do to the lowest common denominator and appearing as they do at peak viewing times, tend to push alternatives to the margins, if not out of the picture altogether.

And the longer this situation continues, the longer will Malaysian television remain television for escaping and for the mindless.

ROM NAIN writes about the media in Malaysia, is critical of state and market control of the media, and yearns for the day when Malaysian media practitioners and educators can genuinely talk with pride about their work.