Media Ownership

The media in many countries all over the world are subject to some form of media ownership and control. With media elements such as print, radio, films, and television being owned and regulated, the people are not free to do or speak as they wish.

Most Southeast Asian countries have a large number of the media owned either directly or by component parties of the government. This form of media ownership restricts the practice of freedom of speech as well as controls the content that is broadcasted through the media. In Malaysia, the media is government owned and heavily controlled; which puts a limit on the different viewpoints presented and provides the state with an opportunity to manipulate the media coverage (Weiss 2012). As for Singapore, the control of the media has been labeled as tightly constrained (Freedom House 2010).

With all the restrictions and regulations in place, people are feeling the pressure and have resorted to other mediums as a place for them to voice out their thoughts and opinions. They found this avenue with the increasingly popular blogging culture as well as the Internet, which had minimal censorship (Ahmad et al. 2011).

While the Internet is not regulated as much as other forms of media, this does not mean that users of the Internet will say or write as they please. With knowledge of existing regulations and acts in place, most bloggers claim to apply self-censorship as well as common sense when creating content. This just shows that their speech is still altered in some way or another. 

This form of self-censorship is practiced by almost all bloggers regardless of the topics that they blog about. Even with bloggers that regularly write about beauty or entertainment products, the self-censorship is still applied causing most of the bloggers content to be relatively similar to one another and lack useful or honest opinions. As long as the acts and regulations are still intact, bloggers in both Malaysia and Singapore will constantly fear being charged with defamation for simply being honest, which has happened on many occasions and has become the most common legal problem faced by the media industry (Teo 2005).

References

Ahmad, AL, Mohamad, EMW, Redzuan, B, Hassan, A, Pawanteh, L, Ahmad, F & Aziz, J 2011, ‘Regulating Blogs in Malaysia’, The Innovation Journal: The Public Sector Innovation Journal, vol. 16, no. 3, article 12.

Freedom House 2010, Freedom World, report, Freedom House, viewed 20 May 2014, <http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2010/singapore - .U3x7nF41f1o>.

Teo, Y. (2005). Media law in Singapore (2nd ed.). Singapore: Sweet & Maxwell Asia.

Weiss, ML 2012, Politics in Cyberspace: New Media in Malaysia, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Germany.