Who Gets to Tell the Story?

Reading around Southeast Asian policy issues for this blog, certain stories kept coming up underreported. It was not until I came across a piece on media ownership in the region that the pattern started to make sense. That made me rethink something I had written earlier: that media is a tool activists can use. I had not seriously considered what happens when the outlet itself is not built to carry what you are trying to say.

Media coverage is not neutral. Most people know that. What gets talked about less is the structural reason it is not: who owns the news outlet, and what that ownership is designed to protect.

In Singapore, the media is a duopoly between state-linked Mediacorp and SPH Media. In Malaysia, Media Prima has long had ties to governing parties. In the piece on media ownership I mentioned above, an executive at Utusan Melayu, one of Malaysia's oldest newspapers, was quoted saying that checking on the government was not the newspaper's role. He said it plainly, without apparent discomfort, as if it were simply how things were. The statement itself needed no defence. What it points to is the environment that produced it: one where no justification was needed, no hedging, no awareness that it might strike a reader as a problem. What emerges is not a lie. It is a gap between what is covered and what matters to anyone who is not in a position to shape the coverage.

The pattern is not limited to Asia. The Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corp, a company that also controls major newspapers across the United Kingdom and Australia. Harold Evans, who edited The Sunday Times under Murdoch, quoted him as saying “I give instructions to my editors all round the world.” He did not deny it at the Leveson Inquiry in 2012. Ownership concentration creates pressures that rarely announce themselves, including to the journalists working under them.

If you are thinking about communication as a tool for advocacy, this is not an abstract problem. What does it mean for movements trying to get their message heard through news outlets shaped by these same pressures? Independent journalism exists, but it is underfunded and increasingly hard to find. That is a problem worth taking seriously.

None of this has a clean answer yet. But sitting with the question is at least more honest than assuming the media is neutral. What both cases suggest is that the norms were already there. Most of the time, nobody has to say them out loud.