Malaysiakini: Sparing no effort for the truth

The co-founder and editor-in-chief of the online Malaysian political newspaper, Malaysiakini, has had his brushes with the law as a result of his strong belief in a free press.

As a reporter back in 1996, he was arrested and thrown in jail for five days while covering a conference on East Timor's political issues held in Kuala Lumpur. In 2003, Malaysiakini's office was raided by the authorities after a complaint was filed by an arm of the ruling United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) against the site because of a letter it published.

Co-founded with Premesh Chandran in 1999--who currently serves as its CEO--the site now supports an editorial team of over 20 staff and attracts 200,000 unique visitors a day, according to Gan.

Gan and Chandran were ranked 18th in Asiaweek's annual "Asia's 50 Most Powerful People" supplement in 2001.

ZDNet Asia spoke with Gan about the support from the community in Malaysia, freedom of speech and gaining trust as a respected news site.

When did you start getting actively involved in politics?
When I was a student in Australia, I was involved in a lot of "extra-curricular work" with anti-racism campaigns, anti-tuition fees campaigns--at the time, schools were making overseas students pay tuition fees. And then there were the solidarity movement and democracy issues in East Timor. When [the protests of 1989 at] Tiananmen [Square] happened I was there, and that's when I met Premesh Chandran.

We later found ourselves working at the national daily, The Sun, together. We tried to do what we could, but there's a limit to how far you could go because there was a lot of self-censorship [practiced] and we fought against the editors all the time.

Eventually, we were tired of hitting ourselves against a brick wall and left. I went on to join The Nation, a daily from Bangkok, but I returned to set up Malaysiakini.

Was it easy transiting over from the mainstream press to Malaysiakini?
All I can say is, I was a little disappointed when I set up Malaysiakini because I wanted several colleagues from The Sun to "defect" from mainstream media but none of them came over. I don't blame them though; they knew the problems we'd face and I couldn't promise them that Malaysiakini would be successful or if they'd have jobs three months down the line either.

How did Malaysiakini get started?
At the height of the Reformasi movement in 1999, the former [Malaysian] deputy prime minister [Anwar Ibrahim] had been arrested and virtually demonized by the mainstream media. There were active demonstrations on the street and a lot of people were looking for information that they weren't getting from the mainstream media.

On the issue of Anwar, the media wasn't reporting in the manner they should. There was a lot of self-censorship and the only way for people to get information was from the Internet, from pro-Reformasi Web sites. Even so, there were a lot of rumors and unconfirmed news.

So Malaysiakini was set up to quickly post news that was researched and investigated. We hired trained journalists and operated it very much like other media outfits--without the censorship, of course.

Are you afraid of being silenced?
Not really. [Then-prime minister] Mahathir Mohamad pledged back in 1995 not to censor the Internet, because he wanted to attract investors to the new Multimedia Super Corridor. This pledge is the loophole we're exploiting.

We knew the sort of harassment we were in for right from the start. We knew we'd face problems. The 2003 raid was something we expected, too. You can't use these attacks as excuses not to do anything [to speak up].

Before the raid, there were a lot of attacks on Malaysiakini through the mainstream media, and ministers were lining up to attack us, to the point where Mahathir called us traitors. We saw the attempts to try and undermine Malaysiakini and wear it down.

When I hire journalists, I tell them very clearly this is not a 9-to-5 job, that they need to be prepared for harassment. I make sure they get into this with their eyes wide open.

What did you learn from the 2003 raid?
That we have strong support from members of the community. During the raid, [the authorities] seized 19 computers. Immediately after, we had a crowd of supporters outside the office for an impromptu candlelight vigil. Some came to loan us PCs, even. It was amazing.

It brought home the point that we had support out there. While we thought very few would dare come out openly to support Malaysiakini, we now saw the support we had out there.

The raid also helped us show the community we were trustworthy. It happened because we published a letter satirizing UMNO Youth, which didn't amuse [the organization] and they made a police report under the Sedition Act. The police offered to leave us alone if we surrendered the identity of the letter writer, but we refused because it is part of our journalistic principle not to reveal our sources.

We stood our ground and people were reassured by that.