As Malaysiakini crosses its 20th year …

COMMENT | Journalism practice has changed dramatically since my first reporting job in Australia in the late 80s. Today, non-profit organisations and the intelligentsia from the right, centre, left, or somewhere in between, are generating open access materials. These excessive contents of varying veracity do shape our perception of trending issues.

This is where we turn to professional journalists to filter out the junk and conspiracies that we inadvertently throw about as "true" in our daily conversations. But the short news cycle and headlines fanned by trolls, keyboard warriors and "truth-seekers' alike, often pushes reporters into an auto-reaction mode. So, they produce digestible news capsules for readers with increasingly shorter concentration span.

No surprise there with the occasional misquotes, misreading of data and Freudian slips when journalists cover emotive issues impinging on race, religion, and less so, sexual orientation in the Malaysian setting.

It’s admissible that journalists are not infallible observers and recorders of events. They bring to their craft certain beliefs of how things ought to be, of what is important from what is not. When the stories do not align with their thinking, they see them as falsifying ...