TAKING arms against a sea of troubles, many governments in Asia have long resisted the tide of unfiltered news, rumour and comment washing over their citizens via the internet. On August 15th one prime minister, Najib Razak of Malaysia, appeared to admit defeat. “In today’s borderless, interconnected world,” he said, “censoring newspapers and magazines is increasingly outdated, ineffective and unjustifiable.” Noting that the internet in Malaysia has always been uncensored, Mr Najib announced a “review” of print censorship laws. Yet what it comes up with is unlikely to be a free-for-all. Across Asia, governments find it hard to cede their power to control flows of information.
The unwitting instrument of Mr Najib’s epiphany was The Economist. An article in our July 16th issue covered the government’s crackdown on a huge demonstration organised by civic groups calling for electoral reform. In the copies of The Economist that reached Malaysians, the article was disfigured by black ink. Three passages—concerning the death of a man (from a heart attack), the banning of the protest march and “heavy-handed police tactics”—were censored. However, they could still be read on our website, or indeed on a number of Malaysian news sites and blogs. As Mr Najib noted, the act of censorship created far more of a fuss than the offending passages. Besides being “outdated, ineffective and unjustifiable”, the censorship was also very bad public relations. More...
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The unwitting instrument of Mr Najib’s epiphany was The Economist. An article in our July 16th issue covered the government’s crackdown on a huge demonstration organised by civic groups calling for electoral reform. In the copies of The Economist that reached Malaysians, the article was disfigured by black ink. Three passages—concerning the death of a man (from a heart attack), the banning of the protest march and “heavy-handed police tactics”—were censored. However, they could still be read on our website, or indeed on a number of Malaysian news sites and blogs. As Mr Najib noted, the act of censorship created far more of a fuss than the offending passages. Besides being “outdated, ineffective and unjustifiable”, the censorship was also very bad public relations. More...
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