The Rough and Rosy Road: Sites of Contestation in Malaysia's Shackled Media Industry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the politics of state media control in Malaysia, with a particular focus on the period since the economic and political turmoil of 1997 and 1998. It argues that the Barisan Nasional (BN) regime has pursued a two-pronged approach to media control, through a strategy of legislative regulation and corporate ownership. Regulatory controls such as stringent printing permit legislation have been weakened by the rise of the Internet as a form of political communication but the regime also has an array of more oppressive legislation at its disposal which has been used as a threat against Internet organizations that challenge its control. Moreover, the broader political economy of Internet access and the finincial limitations of such efforts limit the impact of the Internet as an alternative vehicle of communication. In the realm of corporate ownership, however, the regime has also experienced problems in its media strategy as factional struggles within and between the component parties of the ruling coalition have resulted in 'newspaper wars' between their respective publications, indicating very publicly the limits of the BN's media control strategy, as well as undermining its self-promoted image as a consensus builder. The article concludes that whilst neither of these challenges is sufficiently strong to undermine regime domination of the media industry and push significantly for democratization in the country, they are nonetheless important representations of the limits of the state's control.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".