Let's discuss and not make a fuss

Malaysian Business, Nov 16, 2005 by A Kadir Jasin

That was what happened to a young man who married the beautiful wife of a late Malay singer some years ago. To spare this man and his wife of any embarrassment, let us call him Encik Abu. From being Encik Abu, he was reduced to `the husband of the woman who was formally married to singer so-and-so'. And there is nothing as unkind and hurtful than when the man's children from his previous marriage to his dearly departed wife are referred to as `anak tiri (stepchildren) so-and-so'.

Since celebrity and entertainment have become so important to so many Malaysians, I wonder whether it is a good media practice to continue concealing the identities of people romantically linked to celebrities? For instance, the popular media has, for months, been referring to a certain `Datuk K' as being romantically linked to singer Siti Nurhaliza Taruddin.

Half of Malaysia knows who `Datuk K' is. The cellular phone companies make quite a considerable amount of money on account of people sending SMS to tell friends about `Datuk K'.

I may be wrong. If I am, I apologise. But friends in the entertainment media and the corporate world tell me that `Datuk K' is a successful Kedah businessman by the name of Khalid Jewa.

I think the media should get over this business of concealing a person's identity by reducing his or her name to a single letter of the alphabet.

In doing so, they are doing injustice to all the maligned Datuks and Tan Sris whose names happen to start with the same letter. `Datuk K', for instance, can be mistaken for any Datuk whose name starts with the same letter like Kadir, Kamal, Kamil, Kassim, Kasmo, Kumaraswamy, Kalimuthu, Kam, Kim, Kang and so on. Such an unnecessary mystery can also harm Siti Nurhaliza's reputation.

But thanks to the penchant for celebrity and celebrity status, the Mawi Syndrome has now consumed the lives of many Malaysians, in particular the Malays, causing them to drift further and further away from reason, rationale and reality.

No wonder the tabloid Harian Metro, that makes who-is-sleeping- with-whom and who-is-divorcing-whom in the Syariah courts its staple diet, is said to be set to overtake its more serious sister paper Berita Harian and rival Utusan Malaysia.

A fellow journalist calls this process `dumbing down'. Personally, the news of Harian Metro overtaking its rivals, if it is true, will not come as a surprise to me.

On a lecture trip to one of the public universities in the north of the Peninsula some years ago, I was told by a professor that the most widely read newspaper among the academic staff and students of his university was Harian Metro, with the magazine counterpart being Mastika. The latter is well known for its kubur berasap (smoking grave) and mayat tak reput (corpse that did not decompose) stories.

There may be two reasons for this `dumbing down' process - an education system that does not encourage critical thinking and readers who are getting fed-up with the spin by the mainstream media.

Whatever the case is, it does not bode well for the National Language, which is supposed to be the language of knowledge and thought, and for Malay newspapers, which are struggling to attract the advertising dollar.