Gatekeeping in media, Malaysia (Blog 1)

Most of the news in Malaysia are being filtered in the process known as gatekeeping and this is done by the government in order to broadcast only favourable news to the government and the news has the heaviest censorship. The content of the news is usually altered to broadcast the good deed by the government and unfavourable news to the government are either toned down or heavily censored. The news tend to broadcast what they want us to know and not what we suppose to know. As the news has filtered the audience will not obtain accurate content from the original source.

To give an example of censorship in our country, in the event of MH370, local news channel broadcast only the loss of the airplane and the searching process, but they ignore contents that are unfavourable and often criticize the lack of government response as broadcast in other countries such as China and Taiwan where talks about the Malaysia government inability and lack of devotion of resources to solve the problem of MH370 are prevalent.

In our channel and newspaper, we only obtain news that the government want the audience to have for the airplane and has become the only platform where government spread the news to us. Other views unfavourable to the government are largely ignored and unreported. Therefore, Malaysia media freedom is heavily constrained and this is known as media pressure.