"If I don't see my neighbour on the TV shows I watch, do they exist?"
By Lim Ming Kuok
"A Look Into Media and Race in Malaysia."
The tagline for Yasmin Ahmad's deceivingly simple Merdeka Day commercial titled Tan Hong Ming in Love was "Our children are colour blind. Shouldn't we keep them that way?" The TV commercial started off with a little boy being asked if he has a girlfriend, the bashful boy of Chinese descent admits to the fact that he does have a girlfriend by the name of Ummi Qazrina. In the next scene, little Ummi Qazrina was asked if she has a boyfriend. The little girl of Malay descent replied earnestly that the she does, and the name of the boy is Tan Hong Ming. The very surprised and clearly overjoyed little boy proceeded to take the girl's hand and both them walked off the screen hand in hand. In another piece by the same director, two school boys of Chinese and Malay descent were being interviewed in the school's cafeteria. Both of them were asked to spell the word 'dinosaur'. Both of them got the word wrong. Next, they were asked who their best friend was, they pointed to each other. When asked if they knew what their friend's race is, both of them apparently did not know the meaning of the word. Thus the objective of the commercial was achieved and many a viewer would likely to have nodded in agreement with many 'oohs' and "ahhs" in between. Then we wait patiently for the next Merdeka season to see another batch of heart-warming commercials that transcends race, religion and other cultural barriers.
Perhaps, "commercial" is a misnomer for these made-for-television advertisements. They are really public service announcements (PSA) or even what you would call indirect state-sponsored messages with the aim to foster unity among the people in the country. These feel good PSAs appear once in a while to remind us that we are really just the same, race does not matter and above or else we are all Malaysians. And for about 90 seconds or whatever the length of the commercials is, we all believe that race does not matter in this multi-everything country that is Truly Asia. However, when the season of independence and unity comes to an end, we are again reminded by reality that things are not always as they are depicted on television. There is a disconnect between what the mass media is portraying and what we experience in reality including the portrayal of 'race' in the country.
The history of mass media has been dotted with attempts to harness the power of the mass medium to create a national identity and unity amongst its people. Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff wrote about the historical function of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as "an agent for the national culture" in Britain. In Japan, a country that it is generally considered to be relatively high in cultural homogeneity, had for a couple of decades after the end of World War II been obsessed on the promotion of what has been called Nihonjinron or literally 'theories on the Japanese". Nihonjinron essentially asks the question "who is Japanese" and "what makes us unique"1.
Television shows and newspapers added to the dynamics of the debate with talk-shows and series of articles discussing the topic. On a darker note, the mass media had also been used to rally unity of negative kind. A case in point was the use of radio in the Rwanda Genocide between the Hutus and the Tutsi in 1994 where almost a million Rwandans were killed. The mass media had been used in these examples and more for the simple reason that it may be the most efficient way of relaying the message, whatever they may be, to the people. Benedict Anderson observed in his much cited book, Imagined Communitiesi2, that the in modern cities of even the smallest country, it has become near impossible to know everyone of its inhabitants beyond the few hundred or thousands that one could claim to have met face to face. Therefore, we know the other people who live in the country through the mass media including print, broadcasting, and the Internet.
The creation of the first private television station, TV3, in the Malaysia in 1984 was in no small part due to the belief that the mass media could shape a person's view of national identity. In the early 80s, the video-cassette recorder (VCR) was at the height of its popularity. Massively popular television dramas and musical movies from Hong Kong and India flooded the local market in the form of contraband videotapes3. The government at the time was afraid of that the highly popular foreign media would have an adverse effect on the people, and "could even impair campaigns for national unification and might even raise the possibility of political destabilization"4. This of course must be controlled and the idea of setting up a private station was mooted. TV3 provided free-to-air programming that was not available on the state-owned channel specifically Hong Kong television dramas and Indian movies. The project proved to be a success. The following year, the sales of videotapes dropped significantly and by 1997, TV3 has become the station with the highest viewership, garnering 45-50 percent of the Malaysian viewers5. The setting up of a private station was a brilliant plan that in one fell swoop, managed to reduce the inflow of contraband foreign media, creating a popular station, and gave the perception that the country was embracing the global wave of media privatization. The new station also gave the government a new control mechanism. While it is true that local viewers get to watch foreign programmes on the new channel, in reality the government had the final say in what gets to be aired on the channel.
There is a very real obstacle in dealing with the mass media in Malaysia. To satisfy the needs of every ethnic group or to portray fairly and equally all the groups in the mass media may be unfeasible financially. While relatively homogenous countries like Japan and South Korea, may be able to get away with monolingual programming on all the channels, Malaysian broadcasters cannot really do that. Yet our market is not nearly as big enough to cater for every niche unlike countries with a much larger market such as the United States. Even with the largest media market in the whole, many multicultural efforts in the United States still failed in the end because of the highly competitive market. Furthermore, Malaysian media practitioners also have to contend with cultural and religious sensitivities as well as arbitrary laws and regulations. Those who have try to push the racial envelope, usually find themselves needing to push extra hard.
Director Teck Tan's Spinning Gasing in 2000 was the first English-language Malaysian film, and one of the first to deal head-on with the issues of religion, mixed marriages. Film reviewers reveled in the fact that the film also featured a "Malay, Chinese, Indian and Lain-Lain" cast. We do not get these kinds of films often, even though it should have been the very essence of what makes Malaysia unique. The next notable film to address these issues head-on has been Yasmin Ahmad's Sepet in 2004 (more than four years later). In the intervening years, we had to contend with more of the Scenarios and Sembilu franchise. When Spinning Gasing first came out, it was banned in the country and not until several international awards and cuts in the editing-room later was the film allowed to be released within the country. Similarly, Sepet also encountered many difficulties prior to the release and not the least was the lack of investment interest in the film. The director and her producers reportedly had to sell their cars to finance the film while waiting for the funding to come through from FINAS6.
Going back to the title of this article, "If I don't see my neighbour on the TV shows I watch, do they exist?" Indeed, what we see or do not see in mass media has a lot to do with how we view our fellow Malaysians. As Benedict Anderson has observed, we form our understanding of our country (and countrymen) through the mass media we consume. The question could also be "Do we want to become what we see on the TV?" Do we want to end up looking like a Malaysia Truly Asia commercial? Take a look at one of these beautifully executed tourism commercials and you are very likely to see the idealized version of Malaysia in harmony in all its colorful spectacles. Granted that commercials are originally meant as marketing gimmicks for tourism, how should we view such ads? Should we then take these Malaysia Truly Asia commercials as the ideal-form of what Malaysians should strive for? Do scenes of the Ibans and the Kadazans engaging in a perpetual indigenous dance in traditional costumes really add anything to our understanding of each other? Or does a picturesque scene of the proverbial "Ahmad, Ah Meng, and Muthu" working together against all odds to accomplish a task in yet another Petronas-sponsored commercial really help us in solving the hardship faced by all races in reality? Perhaps, the next time we watch a film, a TV show, or a flip open a magazine, we should all question how we are being portrayed in the media.
1 Sugimoto, Y. (1999). Making Sense of Nihonjinron. Thesis Eleven, 57(1), 81-96.
2 Anderson, B. R. O. G. (2006). Imagined communities : reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London ;; New York: Verso.
3 McDaniel, D. O. (2002). Electronic tigers of Southeast Asia the politics of media, technology, and national development. Ames: Iowa State University Press.
4 Ibid.
5 Media Prima Overview. Retrieved (Sept 9, 2008) from http://www.mediaprima.com.my/bg.asp.
6 No business like show business. Retrieved (April 1, 2005) from http://www.thesundaily.com/article.cfm?id=8261
Lim Ming Kuok is a product of Malaysian, Japanese, and American education. A final year PhD. Candidate at the Pennsylvania State University (U.S) in the field of Mass Communication, he is deeply interested in the relationship between media, society, and democracy. Currently, he is researching on the connection between blogging and democracy, using Malaysia as a case study. He recently concluded a series of interviews with prominent bloggers, academicians, and media practitioners in the country on the same topic.