Press Freedom Day and marijuana

It was a kind of 'interested' feeling that ran through me as I rushed from an interview back to the office today, to catch the final hour of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) forum on Press Freedom in commemoration of the World Press Freedom Day.
What interested me most was the presence of the celebrity blogger Mr. Ahirudin Attan or Rocky, a familiar face, and R. Nadeswaran or Citizen Nades of The Sun, who were among five speakers. The PM's son-in-law Mr. Khairy Jamaluddin had officiated the event earlier. According to rockybru.blogspot.com Khairy had surprised by backing the call for Press freedom in opening the forum.

Moderating it was University of Malaya Media Studies Head of Department Prof Dr Azizah Hamzah, with Hanafiah Man of Agenda Daily and YB Tien Chua completing the line-up.

I entered the quarter-full theathrette at Balai Berita just as the Q&A session had began, and sure enough my guess was almost right. Except that everything about Press Freedom centred around what happened before, during and after the March 8 general elections.

To a question, or rather a remark, by Star senior writer Shahanaz Habeeb, about the boycott of the mainstream media as called for by a number of blogs not working, Rocky completed his reply by stating the bloggers will be calling for journalists to march for their freedom, failing which the bloggers will march calling for the journalists to do so.

This came on the back of a somewhat silently unanimous agreement on the call for mainstream media to be free of political ownership. Bla Bla Bla...

But seriously, if the journalists themselves were interested in this fight, the presence in the theathrette today would have been more than the 20-odd persons, which included some university students.

Personally, my simple mind kind of (forgive me) draws similarities in this whole issue of Press freedom and freedom of speech in Malaysia in general, to let's say the taboo subject of the legalisation of marijuana.

Yup, people just didn't talk about it (freedom of speech) seriously enough prior to this. They just talked (or wrote) until they realised they weren't allowed to talk (or write) about everything and anything. Then it led to an age of protest like in America during the Vietnam War. When they didn't agree with their Government, the youth resorted to smoking pot and screwing each other freely. Some got caught, some didn't.

The same here, when people suddenly don't agree with the Government, and they realise that their speech (or writing) may be hindered (politically or lawfully), they turn to blogging and they use blogs to screw each other too. But they also screw the Press, and the Press try to screw them back. Some did manage to get themselves caught as well, while others weren't caught but sued, cautioned or hauled in for questioning.

Then the West graduated to an age of liberal understanding in the nineties where the minds were open enough to call for, fight for and complete the legalisation of (or so called liberalisation of laws governing) marijuana, even if only for therapeutic use. The battle took a decade in Holland, much more than that in California.

In Malaysia, the time between the realisation that the new media were playing a role in politics, the opening up of minds to the realisation, understanding and control of this newfound ticket (or shortcut) to the freedom of speech, has all been crammed into a significant period of two months, three days and counting.

Interestingly, it is the freedom of speech that allowed people, just like us, to address something initially thought as so bad, so dirty, so sinful and so immoral as marijuana. And turned it into something acceptable, something controllable, something that probably even MPs could smoke at tea breaks. The users co-exist with those who despise them in one happy country.

Now, with senior politicians and newspaper editors also counting themselves as bloggers, the new media has found its way along the same path in Malaysia hasn't it?