Middle East-owned news station Al Jazeera is
demanding to know what local content regulations that Astro was forced
to 'comply' with.
KUALA
LUMPUR: Satellite broadcasting station, Astro, which recently won the
Putra Award for Best Brand, has just earned itself a slew of public
insults over its high-handed “editing” of British Broadcasting
Corporation’s (BBC) and Al Jazeera stations’ news coverage of the Bersih
3.0 rally last Saturday.
While public comments running on the worldwide web have been spewing
venom at Astro’s stand to “bow before Umno-BN policies”, Middle
East-owned television station, Al Jazeera, is not going to take this
“intrusion” into its “editorial process” lying down.
On the back of World Press Freedom Day celebrations today, Al Jazeera
in a statement said: “Our news report was a factual account of events
that day, and intrusion in our editorial process is unwarranted.
“We have not been censored in this way by another distribution platform anywhere in the world.”
Astro had allegedly snipped off parts of Al Jazeera’s news coverage of the Bersih rally by its onground reporter Harry Fawcett.
Al Jazeera said they will be “asking Astro for an explanation” as to why Fawcett’s report of the rally was allegedly censored.
“If Astro is indeed saying that it breached local content
regulations, it would need to outline exactly what these alleged
breaches were and how it arrived at its decision,” the statement said.
It also noted that the “censoring was not made clear to viewers when
it happened” and that Al Jazeera was not notified of the incident by
Astro.
Earlier, BBC had demanded that Astro explain itself after it was
reported that the Malaysian station had edited out 30 seconds of BBC
senior reporter Emily Buchanan’s two-minute news clip of the rally which
turned violent after Bersih had called for the crowd to disperse.
Three frames sequences were taken off from the BBC clip in the
doctored version. Among them were one sequence showing a policeman
allegedly firing at demonstrators.
BBC-Astro warpath
The other two sequences were interviews with demonstrators who gave
first-hand accounts of why they took to the streets demanding for clean
and fair elections.
In a terse demand note to Astro, BBC “strongly” condemned “any
blocking of the trusted news that we broadcast around the world
including via distribution partners”.
However, BBC’s affront which was articulated on Sarawak Report (SR)
was trivialised by Astro and Malaysia’s Information, Communications and
Culture Minister Rais Yatim.
Rais, who incidentally described the Bersih rally as “kotor” (dirty),
defended Astro’s right, saying it was the satellite television’s
prerogative to air the “best parts” of the poll reforms rally.
Said Rais: “(Astro) has to be given credit for knowing which part of
the news is newsworthy and therefore they should exercise that within
their rights as a broadcasting firm.”
Astro, meanwhile, simply said they had to “comply with local content regulations”.
Said Astro’s senior vice-president for Broadcast Operations, Rohaizad
Mohamad: “As a licensed broadcaster, Astro is required to comply with
the national content regulations.
“When it comes to international content providers, Astro reserves the
right to edit its international channels for the purposes of complying
with the content regulations.”
Astro’s comment was in response to BBC’s demand letter which “condemned” Astro’s censorship of its news clip.
Astro’s response will no doubt put it on a warpath with BBC, which is
already smarting with embarrassment over an earlier issue involving
London-based FBC Media Ltd and several paid-for public relations spins
on Malaysia and its leadership, which were passed off as genuine
documentaries and aired over BBC’s World News.
Najib’s contradicting statement
BBC had publicly apologised in February for breaking “rules aimed at
protecting our editorial integrity” following an expose by online
investigative portal, Sarawak Report.
Two months before the extraordinary apology, the BBC admitted that
there had been 15 breaches of editorial guidelines, eight of them in
documentaries about Malaysia that were produced by FBC, a company that
has done public relations work for foreign governments, including the
regime of Hosni Mubarak during the Egyptian uprising.
BBC said FBC had failed to declare to them that the Malaysian
government had paid the PR company RM85 million for “global strategic
communications” campaign.
While Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Nazri Aziz admitted
in Parliament last November that the government had indeed engaged FBC
to improve Malaysia’s image, Prime Minister Najib Tun Tun Razak however
recently said otherwise.
In a written reply to opposition MP Mahfuz Omar, Najib told
Parliament last month: “We (government) have never contracted a foreign
news company to make ourselves look good.”
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