Controversy
Malaysiakini has attracted its fair share of controversy. In March 2001, police in the Malaysian state of Selangor lodged a report against the website for quoting comments questioning the official death toll from racial rioting in the city of Petaling Jaya. In July of the same year, a university student leader filed a report claiming that a letter published on Malaysiakini bearing his name was not written by him.
However, the most serious incident occurred on January 20th, 2003 when Malaysiakini was raided by the Malaysian police. Four servers and 15 personal computers from its office worth RM150,000 (US$39,500) were seized during the raid. The police raid was instigated after the right-wing cadres in UMNO Youth, an arm of the ruling United Malays National Organization (UMNO), complained that a letter written by "Petrof", a reader, and published on Malaysiakini's website was seditious. In its police report, UMNO Youth claimed that the letter had questioned the special rights and privileges of the Bumiputras that are enshrined in the Constitution. Additionally, UMNO Youth claimed that the letter also contained false allegations that the Malaysian government was unfair to other ethnic races in the country. The seizure of the hardware temporarily silenced Malaysiakini, though it eventually resumed its normal operations.
On April 1, 2005 Malaysiakini published a fake news report alleging that four unnamed senior government officials were being charged for corruption. The report turned out to be an April Fool's joke, albeit published with the intention of casting the spotlight on official corruption, a problem still rife in Malaysia. These caused quite a stir in Malaysia with the government ordering a probe on the news organization.
Read more about this topic: Malaysiakini
Famous quotes containing the word controversy:
“Ours was a highly activist administration, with a lot of controversy involved ... but I’m not sure that it would be inconsistent with my own political nature to do it differently if I had it to do all over again.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)