Muhyiddin Yassin scores top points in 'attack politics'
Dubbed the 'mother of all elections', the 13th Malaysian general elections face strong interest from local and international media organisations, with some questions being raised about the independence of media outlets during their coverage of this intense campaigning period. The Centre of Independent Journalism is working with researchers from the University of Nottingham Malaysia campus on a project called Watching the Watchdog, to find out if media outlets here are providing fair coverage. The project studied the election coverage of close to 30 publications and media outlets over a 14-day period. Here's what Susan Tam learnt from their research so far.
1. In terms of the tone of mentions of named politicians and political figures, Anwar Ibrahim receives the highest proportion of negative mentions (16.4%) and the highest proportion of attacks (20.8%).
2. Lim Kit Siang and Niz Aziz are the next most often attacked (16.4% and 12% respectively).
3. Meanwhile, caretaker Prime Minister Najib Razak received the highest proportions of both positive (57.1%) and neutral mentions (27%). Former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed received the second most positive mentions (5.2%), followed by Muhyiddin Yassin (5.2%).
4. Overall, BN politicians are given the highest proportion of positive mentions by a very significant margin (77.7% as opposed to PR's 18.6%), while PR politicians are given the highest proportion of negative mentions by a significant margin (65.41% as opposed to BN's 29.2%).
5. The online media give relatively equal coverage to both major coalitions (favouring PR very slightly), with PR and BN and their parties at 47% and 44.8% respectively.
6. Only online portals have been featuring BN and PR with equal quantities and quality of coverage compared with its print and broadcast counterparts. BN are given the most coverage as well as the most favourable reporting by newspapers and television stations. The project notes that the balanced information offered by online organisations is threatened by many challenges, including being barred from attending UMNO events and regular Distributed Denial-of-Service (DdoS) attacks on their news portals.
7. Online news portals feature news about independent politicians more than their print and broadcast rivals, while state-funded wire agencies, newspapers and televisions barely use Opposition politicians as a source of information.
8. Caretaker Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin is noted to be the top source in carrying out the highest proportion of 'attack' politics, followed by Najib and Mahathir. The three are responsible for close to 60% of political attacks made against their opponents. Muhyiddin's rival from the PR camp is Kit Siang, followed by his son Guan Eng and Anwar.
9. The project also revealed politicians from PR were 'attacked' 4.3 times more than their BN counterparts in these media organisations. The Bahasa Malaysia media coverage was found to be supportive of BN and is strongly anti-Opposition, while the Mandarin coverage was revealed to be more even-handed.
10. The project studied close to 20,000 articles from the mainstream media outlets, including ones from Sabah and Sarawak, such as Utusan Borneo (Sabah), Utusan Borneo Bahasa Malaysia (Sarawak), See Hua Daily (Sabah) and See Hua Daily News (Sarawak). Online portals studied were Malaysiakini and Malaysian Insider.
