RPK’s explosive innuendo and the blog-bashing bandwagon

By Helen Ang

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Raja Petra Kamarudin’s posting ‘Let’s send the Altantuya murderers to hell’ landed him in the police station yesterday.

As can be gleaned from the title of his post, he touched on an explosive topic.

RPK’s earlier ‘See you in hell Muhamad son of Muhamad’ – a ‘pistols at dawn’ challenge to the former Selangor Menteri Besar – could arguably be the most read ever piece of writing by a Malaysian. It’s certainly one of the most enjoyable.

But while we relished ‘See you in hell’ for its swashbuckling bravado, ‘Let’s send to hell’ is in a different vein and on an altogether sad subject. With it, RPK went out on a limb while carefully keeping what he wrote on the Altantuya murder trial to innuendo.

An English grammarian Sharon Baker has described MSM aptly: “The newspapers have always given Malaysians plenty of practice in how to read behind the lines, through the lines, upside down between the lines, in a country when what is not stated in the newspapers (sacrosanct standards and all) is often more important than what is.”

RPK’s new edition of ‘Hell’ filled between the lines what MSM deliberately chose to miss out. Yet his post is the sort what fuels accusations by blog-bashers that blogosphere is filled with rumours.

Najib Razak’s wife has guaranteed that all the stories about her on the Internet are untrue.

At the last Umno general assembly, Puteri chief Noraini Ahmad said irresponsible bloggers slander and lie.

In December at a roundtable organised by The Star, the paper’s group editor Wong Chun Wai commented, “ … people in cyberspace often shout, unable to discuss, using inflammatory language, calling names and making allegations.” The forum was reported under the headline ‘Caught in a Web-spin’.

When another Star editor in its Europe bureau headlined his column ‘Beware the spin-masters’ accusing bloggers, he failed to realise that 3 fingers were pointing back at newspapers.

Even readers chip in through Letter to the Editor. “The proliferation of blogs as a means of political communication – and the need for constant individual verification – will eventually encourage the entire project to collapse under its own weight,” is confidently predicted by U-En Ng.

“It is here that the traditional media, such as this newspaper [The Star], will in the long run maintain the upper hand if unbiased fact and well-considered opinion remain the foundation of their credibility.”

NST had Rehman Rashid last year saying, “Rumour, innuendo, half-truths and damned lies are their [bloggers’] stock-in-trade”. theSun not to be outdone devoted a whole Jacqueline Ann Surin column to it, here http://www.sun2surf.com/article.cfm?id=20648

Blogosphere’s most persuasive response to Rehman comes from Sharon http://thebookaholic.blogspot.com/search?q=barnyard. Her Bibliobibuli blog also carried a posting which should be read against theSun article cited above. http://thebookaholic.blogspot.com/2008/01/writing-by-amir.html

Sharon regrets the out-and-out confrontation between bloggers and media, and believes “there should be symbiosis” between the Fourth and Fifth Estates for the common good.

She also made a salient point: “But being published in a newspaper or magazine always confers greater respectability: an editor has found your work worthy of being put before the public. That will continue to mean a great deal.”

Rehman’s take is that bloggers constituted “a host of folk who never had a hope of getting published”, and were thus reduced to self-publishing in free-for-all cyberspace.

Sharon is correct about the lingering perception though I disagree with the public’s assumption that print must necessarily be the more reliable.

Allow me to reference Rustam Sani: “To counter claims that society was being, in effect, brainwashed by this media monopoly, government-controlled corporate publishers – and to a certain extent the journalists themselves – promote the idea of ‘professional journalism’ (a concept defined narrowly to be confined to journalistic activities of those who work full-time in newsrooms of the mainstream newspaper establishments).”

Rustam adds: “The situation is quite akin to a group of people, by virtue of some unclear and unqualified definitions, calling themselves ‘ulamas’ and thereby qualifying themselves, at the exclusion of others, for certain leadership positions in an Islamic political party hierarchy.”

You’d probably agree with me that Malaysian newspapers are timid. They were not the agents of change. New Media were. And although too many hero-worship RPK, and his writing certainly has its faults, in as far as the written word can go he has the potential to chart history. And easily spark another round of blog-bashing, but that’s par for the course.

‘Let’s send the Altantuya murderers to hell’ is hardly your average grumblestiltskin mouthing off in cyberspace. RPK is playing for monumentally high stakes. His posting is like a game of poker. So who’s the one bluffing and who’s got the ace in the sleeve?

What RPK has posted is more than the sum of its parts and the act is one of throwing the gauntlet, rendering the political scenario even more volatile. Raja Petra is both an enfant terrible and the Father of All Blogs.

‘He who dares wins’. We wait in trepidation.