Of May and Media

Been trying unsuccessfully to sleep for the past few hours. Blame it on the caffeine from the bubble tea? Nah, that was consumed ages earlier. Habitually trawled through the latest news feeds. Oh boy, when it rains, it really pours, and May certainly feels like monsoon month. Let's see, this month we've had:

• Infamous blogger Raja Petra Kamaruddin the first blogger to be charged under Malaysia's 1948 Sedition Act
• Cyclone Nargis wreaking havoc and devastation across Myanmar
• A Tibetan woman hoisting the Olympic Torch at the top of Mt. Everest
• A horrendous 7.2 earthquake hitting the Sichuan region in China, with the quake and aftershocks felt across the whole country and even in Thailand
• Barack Obama just about to clinch the Democratic nomination for presidential candidate
• Mother's Day in Malaysia
• And last but not least,

EXAMS
(kill me please.)

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The New York Times is currently running a series "examining the lives of youth across the Muslim world at a time of religious revival", and it was to my utter dismay when I saw that articles #3 and 4 were about the lack of individual freedom in dating and marriage in Saudi Arabia. Click on the numbers for the links, but I wouldn't advocate either article if you're looking for sophisticated or intellectual reading. Considering how this series was meant to showcase a current snapshot of Muslim youths in general, I was quite stunned by such a biased and blinkered representation of the Islamic world in the two articles, and even more so considering the prestigious reputation of the NY Times.

Yes, I can understand the need for journalists to produce attention-grabbing headlines, and their fondness for intense coverage on issues that are guaranteed to stir up their readers, but has journalism fallen to such a low that even the higher ranks of journalists (ie non-paparazzi) resort to such sensationalist, one-sided reporting in order to increase their readership? I'd freely admit that even I have succumbed to the cheap allure of the shock headliner (t0 illustrate, see my previous blog post, 'Of Airports and Boobs', which actually elicited a response from Mr. Malat-Lou-in-Miri), but the main point is that I write for my own enjoyment and limited circle of friends, whereas a newspaper has the responsibility towards its shareholders and readership to produce neutral, balanced, discerning journalism. (Politics-studying/loving friends will argue with me that no newspaper is ever neutral, but I digress.)

What's even worse is that the 3rd article, "Young Saudis, Vexed and Entranced by Love's Rules", obviously succeeded in eliciting an outpouring on views on the issue - 257 comments by readers from all over the world. Quite troublingly, a sizeable chunk of them express different combinations of revulsion, anger, and outrage, some directed against the Saudi Arabia as a whole, and others sweepingly at Saudi-Islamic male-female segregation practices even though the ultra-conservative practices in the article are in fact limited to a small number of ultra-conservative Saudi families. One sentence that struck me as being particularly sloppy reporting was: "Saudi Arabia’s strict interpretation of Islam, largely uncontested at home by the next generation and spread abroad by Saudi money in a time of religious revival, will increasingly shape how Muslims around the world will live their faith." Firstly, just like how traditional Christian/religious practices vary across countries, the situation in Saudi Arabia is hardly a blanket representation of that of other Muslim countries. Furthermore, what an idiotic assumption that Saudi Arabia's considerable but hardly unrivaled oil wealth grants it leader status among Muslim nations!

Gaah, I'm peeved. Accuse me of making sweeping statements, but what's with the plummeting standards of Western journalism nowadays!