the(new)mediaslut

A news report by The Star said that the Malaysian Government is now going to actively engage bloggers because it is now “a new dimension in shaping public opinion.”

All this when just last year (365 days ago) the very same government was “overlooking”, “criticising” and “running them down” because of the “wild and baseless allegations” which the new media makes. After March’s shocking general election results, fast forward to the present, in front of over 500 delegates from Asia and all other places that matter during the Asia Media Summit 2008 and Deputy PM, Najib Tun Razak says, “We need to have people who are active participants of the new media, who are sympathetic and understanding of the government’s position.

He even went so far as to reply to a posting on the Malaysia Today blog. Via his press secretary of course.

And while things seem to be looking up for new media at last, can the same be said for traditional media? To the same aforementioned crowd of 500 delegates, Najib had said, “If you read the newspapers on a daily basis, you will see that they don’t hold back their punches. If they know there are weaknesses or abuse of power anywhere, they will latch on to these and criticise the Government and individuals openly.”

But just three days after this news report, after a Talk for Media Freedom event hosted by all sorts of independent media bodies, Ahirudin Attan of Rocky Bru opined that while he salutes the mainstream media journos and single group chief editor he saw at the Walk and Talk event, “The others mainstream editors* are playing golf, too lazy, very contented, afraid, or probably didn’t even know what the NUJ, NPC, CIJ, WAMI, BENAR and All-Blogs were up to today.”

The head of the BBC news bureau in Bangkok, Jonathan Head, has been accused of lese majeste by Thai authorities for an unspecified comment he made at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand.

The alleged comment, details of which were not given, was made when Head was moderating a panel at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand entitled, “Coup, Capital and Crown”, on 13 December 2007.

Police Major General Wattanasuk Mungkitchakarndee from the Bangkae police station lodged the formal complaint after he reviewed videos and transcript from the panel, though said that Head’s comments were not fit to be repeated in the public domain.

Wattanasuk has previously lodge a similar complaint against Minister to the Prime Minister’s Office Jakrapob Penkair for a comment he also made at the FCCT.

Thailand has some of the strictest laws in the world regarding lese majeste.

From a moral standpoint, can journalists on a junket skip totally irrelevant sessions and go shopping? Or do they have to sit in on sessions, pretend to take notes and not write up anything anyway?

That question came about yesterday when Smartbrain was locked in conversation with a Malaysian journalist at the Shanghai Spring Intel Developer Forum (IDF). The afternoon session of day 0 was all about Intel Capita and its investments into China for the most part. Being a vetran of IDF in Bejing last year, Smartbrain noted to the group that the Intel Capital section was totally and utterly irrelevant to our type of publication at least and last year yielded absolutely nothing for Smartbrain to write about.

Hence, the reasoning went, we should go and check out the fake iPhones and BMW phones at a nearby store. All the more appealing since the event venue is right next to an underground station.

Incidentally there are “Dopodo” phones which boot up with a Windows Mobile facade, look similar to a Symbian S60 phone in use an have a weird full ABCD (as opposed to QWERTY) keypad which makes it almost useless.

However, when a Filipino Intel PR overheard our little plan of egress, she was visibly upset and said we had time on the end of day two to go shopping; that she knew of places in the tourist distrit that gave a nice discount to Intel event attendees and that we should stay.

Exit, Smartbrain stage right, but not before mentioning in passing that some of the shops in Yu Bazarr are ten times more expensive than shops where the locals shop to begin with.

Ten minutes later, Smartbrain finds his merry band of would-be escapees looking totally miserable in the foyer. Apparently there had been a minor incident and none of the other Journalists now felt comfortable with hopping out during the Intel China capital session.

Smartbrain left anyway and got in a sizeable bit of shopping in the Orient IT Plaza that day plus all the information needed to write up a mini shopping in Shanghai story.

On a side note, Shanghai is fun in a barbaric kind of way. If there is no room, shove. The lunch journalist buffet queue was a lesson in how to get ahead without shame: The foreign journos were in a neat, orderly queue (for the most part) while the locals just pushed their way into get food when and where they wanted.

The entrance to the main keynote hall was verging on a crush (and would probably have been illegal in the UK under health and safety laws) and the hapless usher with signs saying “VIP” looked on helplessly on as non-VIP visitors filled up the VIP seats.

At least there aren’t any prostitutes offering their services right outside the convention centre this year as was the case at IDF Beijing last year. Now, that’s progress.

Back on the planet Tatooine (Thailand), Jabba the Hutt (Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej) has continued his criticism of the media, this time accusing media and various human rights agencies of being too concerned about the fate of drug traffickers.

“Why are you [media] so concerned about the fate of drug traffickers?” he asked the press last week, before saying that the best way not to die in the next phase of the controversial “War on Drugs” that his government is about to revive is not to get involved with drugs in the first place.

Further painting himself into a corner (as he usually does), Jabba reiterated his stand on his weekly TV show and this time blamed Media and human rights groups and other NGOs of misleading people and trying to make people misunderstand him and his government’s good policy on drugs.

Today, former senator and long time human rights activist Kraisak Choonhavan returned to the limelight to hit back at these irresponsible, if somewhat predictable (by now) remarks with some hard facts on a television talkshow, Roo Tan Pratate Thai (Thailand Watchdog) on ASTV.

The total number of people killed in the War on Drugs stands at 2,819.

An independent panel back in 2005 set up by the Senate and National Human Rights Commission to look into the War on Drugs policy that began in 2003 under the Thaksin Shinawatra (a.k.a. Senator Palpatine) found that in 837 cases involving 878 deaths, the victims had no evidence of drug dealing or involvement in drugs at all. This number includes extra-judicial killings and where it is deemed that drug dealers kill their agents to prevent a case from going to court. Extra-judicial here is generally defined as when police have to fire back when fired upon.

571 people on the blacklist were killed for “unexplained reasons”.

Kraisak noted the the committee was comprised of the Permanent Secretary and Deputy Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Justice and the former Chief Public Prosecutor.

“He’s (Jabba) talking about the new war on drugs and another three to four thousand more deaths as if he doesn’t care about the value of life,” Kraisak said.

The former senator reminded us that along with the 108 dead in the massacre and the Krue Se mosque and 85 dead at Tak Bai, the previous Thaksin government has a pretty appalling human rights record.

Sunai Pasuk, Thailand adviser to Human Rights Watch joined Kraisak to explain how the blacklist was compiled in only two weeks. Each provincial governor was given two weeks to compile the list and they did so by cobbling together names of those with drug related backgrounds. However, when the Office of the Narcotics Control Board later examined the list, they said that it was not compiled properly with due procedure.

The government then gave each provincial governor a target of three months by which the 5, 25 and 50 percent of the names on each list had to be taken off the list. There were only three ways to be taken off that list: being arrested, being the subject of an extra-judicial killing or dying for an unknown cause.

“Dying for unknown reasons should not be a reason to call an anti-drug drug policy a success,” he said.

Sunai said that it was the Thaksin government, the Surayud Chulanont Government and also today’s Jabba government that has to be responsible to resolve each and every one of those murder cases.

He also alluded that the War on Drugs was probably the reason that Thailand did not sign up to be a founding member the International Criminal Court as if it did, then the TRT government could have been tried at that court. As things stand, joining the court at a later date does not give the court retroactive jurisdiction.

Kraisak noted that Thailand is now the third largest exporter of drugs after Afghanistan and Myanmar. He said that the Thaksin government had a number of Ministers who could not enter the US as they were on a drugs blacklist and that the economic policy at the time was very amicable to the military regime there.

“Today, why are drugs back? It means that the War on Drugs did not do anything to solve the root cause, the producers, and today Thailand is addicted to drugs,” he said.

Smartbrain is of the opinion that if anything, the media are guilty; guilty of not highlighting these atrocities enough and making people understand the big picture beyond the headline of “over 2,000 killed”.

Yes, we do care, and we should care, if half the people killed in the last War on Drugs were not really involved in drug trafficking. So should the people of Thailand. People should not be killed as part of what boils down to just a propaganda campaign.

Thailand’s new Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej (often referred to lovingly as Jabba the Hutt) has almost from day one of his new job found himself embroiled in his role in events surrounding the 6 October 1976 student massacre.

A few weeks ago, days after taking office, he repeatedly told CNN and Al-Jazeera that only one person had died in the event and that he had nothing to do with it.

However, at the time he was not only Deputy Interior Minister but also had a radio show which fired up anti-communist sentiment.

After the massacre of “communists” (a.k.a. pro-democracy, anti-military student protesters), that saw hundreds missing, an official count of 41 or 46 dead (depending on who you ask) and of which Jabba said that only one had died. he was promoted to Interior Minister by the military government that subsequently took power.

Now, all that would have been long forgotten if it were not for the CNN interview. But more recently, on Friday, 22 Feb, Jabba, when confronted with pictures of him and the Military junta, changed his story.

“I was responding to the foreign journalist. It is within my rights, my freedom of speech, to say what I want to foreigners,” he told the press that have turned virtually every press conference into an inquisition on the October massacre since.

The question, Smartbrain asks, is that is it alright to blatantly lie to foreign journalists? That seems to be Jabba’s defense right now as the stability of the government is haunted by ghosts from the past.

This reminds Smartbrain of his first interview with Thailand’s former ICT Minister, Professor Sitthichai Pokaiudom, lovingly referred to as Dr Death as, quite apart from his collection of guns, carries with him a mask and canister of carbon monoxide so that he can commit suicide if he is ever terminally ill.

In that press conference, Dr Death spoke of the on again, off again privatisation of the two state owned telecom companies, CAT and TOT.

“As we are all Thais in this room, I will tell you that they will never be privatised,” he said. “However, a few days ago I was talking to the Farang (meaning Ang Moh or Western) journalists and I told them that privatisation would happen when the time is right.”

It begs the question then, what role foreign media has in a country’s internal affairs? Are the foreigners the unbiased, neutral observers that can objective call shots as they are? Or are they hopelessly biased, up to their nostrils in Western thinking and not seeing the reality on the ground for all their gung-ho views on elections being the be-all and end-all to everything?

Singapore has similarly announced that it is a privilege and not a right for foreign media to circulate in the island/city/state/dot.

Sadly, today successions of Thai politicians now feel it fair game to say whatever they want to foreign media and generally get away with it with little sanction, at least in the case of Dr Death, though Jabba’s fate remains to be seen.

E3’s ban on scantily-clad booth babes contributes to its decline. Good thing the Japanese are smarter.

A few days back, Mike featured Tokyo Game Show 2006 cosplay cuties at Asian Sirens. Now, enjoy the booth babes.

themediaslut was invited to an uncle’s wedding on Thursday.

This uncle seem rather young to be themediaslut’s uncle but based on the generation ranking system in the family, he arn’t heavy, his my uncle.. 

Attending the wedding also allowed themediaslut to experience first hand at a modern Singapore Chinese wedding and good time to practice some photo shooting skills.

The groom (left) is from Singapore and the bride (to be unveiled later) is from Malaysia.

The day started off from the groom’s place in the east and it is tradition to travel from the groom’s parents place to the bride’s parents place to pick her up and escort her back to the groom’s place.

The groom was all waiting and anxious to get the show on the roll.

The Chinese traditionalist would have seek advice from a fortune teller to seek the best time for the groom to leave the house.

However, the parents of the groom are rather modern in their thinking so the groom left accordingly as planned in the wedding intinary as it would be a long day ahead.

However, there were some traditions that were also practised.

For example, when the groom arrived at the bride’s, it is traditionally Chinese for the bride’s youngest brother to open the door of the arriving groom’s carriage.

If the bride does not have any younger brother, the responsibility of opening the door goes to the youngest male, usually nephew or younger male cousin.

On arrival of the bride’s house, there are a couple of obstacles to cross.

First, the main door.

The groom have to bribe the door watchers, usually the sisters or female relatives, to open the door and let the groom in.

The door watchers will ask for a Hong Bao (red packets filled with cash) and mostly start the amount at S$888.

After much bargaining, the groom managed to get the first door opened with a Hong Bao less than S$888, exact amount unknown.

Unfortunately for the groom, there’s another door he had to overcome before he gets to the bride.. He dishes out his ammo of Hong Bao to bribe the another door watcher…

Finally, the door guardians have finally relented to the groom, otherwise the wedding would not have continue either.

Hence the first thing the groom has to do is unveiled the bride.

Now, it was time to take a family portrait with the bride’s parents.

Soon its time for the couple to leave for groom’s house and the father of the bride makes a symbolic gesture of handing over her daughter to her husband.

As the daugher leaves, the father of the bride does one last act of his responsiblity of bringing up his daughther by sheltering her with a red umberella to the wedding car.

As the couple reaches the groom’s house, the youngest male relative of the groom is now responsible for opening the car as the couple makes their way into the house.

The groom’s mother welcomes the couple into the house.

The bride enjoying the view from the nuptial room.

"Show’s over," says the husband as the couple continue to pose for more photos.

Couple serving each other a bowl of "duan yuan" which is made up of red and white glutenious rice balls.

This symbolise the couple willingness to serve each other during the wedding.

The rest of the family and relatives prepare for the "Tea Ceremony".

The "Tea Ceremony" symbolise the couple’s respect for their elders in the family.

The tea is usually made from boiling red dates and dried longang fruit.

The "Tea Ceremony" usually starts with the eldest relatives and it moves down to the youngest elder in the relative, who is usually the older sister or brother.

This "Tea Ceremony" is watched over by a parent who will introduce the family to both the bride and groom, and how the elders should be called.

Usually, the couple will serve the tea kneeling down. The groom’s family are, however, quite modern and allowed the couple to serve tea to them standing up.

After the tea ceremony, it was time to head to the Registry of Marriage (ROM) for the solemization ceremony.

In Singapore, almost all couples solemization at the ROM, though it can be done at churches or arrange for the Justice of Peace to solemize the wedding outside of the ROM.

As the couple approach the entrance of the ROM, there is a guard who does the necessary checks to ensure the right couple is entering the solemization hall accordingly.  

As the father of the groom takes out the necessary documents, the Justice of Peace starts the solemization procedures.

The couple exchanges rings and the father, as one of the witness, signs on the marriage certificate.

After the short 15 minutes solemization ceremony, the couple is now legally married in the eyes of Singapore law.

The couple and family pose for one more time outside the ROM as they head home to prepare for the Chinese wedding dinner later in the evening. 

Photos of the wedding dinner will appear in Part two.