A most primitive way

Some time back, when I was on holiday in a beach resort, I saw 2 kids building sand castles on the beach. One was building a realitively big structure, with moats around the castle and towers and so on. It was a pretty impressive stuff.

The other boy was not so creative. His castle was just a blob of sand sitting on the beach.

Passers-by naturally stopped at the castle of the first boy and uttered complimentary remarks. The second boy must have got frustrated that no one seemed to pay attention to his work, and he suddenly ran across to the first boy’s place and smashed the  impressive castle with one stroke of his arm, in the process destroying the castle. What followed was screams and fights between the 2 boys.

I mentioned this incident which I have almost forgotten because of a news item today in MalaysianInsider, reporting  that that the minister in charrge of Information and Culture is going to review the licence of ‘Astro”, and wanted Astro to add more government friendly programs.

It is not cheap to subscribe to Astro. Recently it has upped its charges again. In fact, it is getting to be a burden to watch Astro.

But still people subscribe to Astro, footing big sum every month instead of watching the free to air channels TV 1, 2 ,3 TV 9, etc. To comply with government requirements, these channels which are government controlled are already carried by Astro (thereby adding to its cost of braodcasting and the cost is passed to consumers like you and me).

But now the minister wanted to review Astro. I do not know what he meant by review; could it be that he  wants every channel to braodcast some Malaysian news? So you watch CNN for a while and suddenly RTM news will take over and you are forced to watch National News; or you are watching a Wai Lai Toi Soap opera  and at the most exciting part, it is ‘ berhenti sementara’, and National news will come on.

Or worse, the government may decide to take off channel 312 the phoenix channel (or other channels deemed to be foreign) since it may deem to be anti-national interest by airing news on other countries, nevermind that now the world is globalised, and the more we learned about other countries , the more we can use that knowledge to build our own.

So this ‘review’ would not be a good thing to those who do not like to watch national channels because they are so stereotyped . 

The review itself   would be  like the second boy above, who could not make a castle as good as the first boy, so he resorted to the most primitive way — destroy it.

 The mentality is like this. If you are not as good, and nobody watches your show, simply destroy the quality of the competitor, so that they come down to your level, and then hope that by doing so, people will come to watch your mediocre shows/propaganda.

What they -the national tv channels – should have done is to find out why their programs are not attractive, and then try to improve on the programs. Try to revamp it to make it interesting. If the policies are bad and that affect the programs , change the policies to be  more people friendly and then it will attract more people to view it.

It  is like holding a motor race. In order to win it,  you make sure that all other cars are equipped with a speed limiter except yours, and the speed limiter will  make sure that your competitor will be slower than your snail-like speed, so you win not by merits but by exerting a unfair limits on other people.

This sort of mentality is disgusting and going backward. And with this sort of mentality , we will never be able to move forward and compete. No wonder even an Indonesian university has stopped taking in Malaysian students.

The power that be  have done it with main stream media, and now with broadcasting media, I wonder what will be next? Filtering news so that we can only get news from RTM? Sanctioning internet?

Why can’t they think of more proactive and forward looking ideas like letting more private TV operators to operate thereby introducing competition to Astro and by doing so lowering the monthly charges ?

Why do they only think of using state power to try to regulate?   What other pathetic ideas will there be? I shudder to think …