Not the superlative we want

WHILE our government tries to tell us that we’re on the up and up despite having no money, in one area at least we’ve taken a deep plunge. We’ve managed to dive 18 places in the World Press Freedom Index 2021 to the 199^th spot, an “astonishing fall, ” according to Reporters Sans Frontieres who does the ranking every year. We may love superlatives in our country but achieving the biggest fall of any of the 180 countries in the index should probably not go into the Malaysian Book of Records.

Nobody with any common sense will be surprised of course that our nose-dive happens to coincide with the change in government last February. Not two years before that, Malaysians woke up with a new sense of freedom. Reporters suddenly looked excited about delivering the news because they were no longer constrained. People were tuning in to TV news programmes and talk shows again because they finally felt they were getting something worthwhile from them, instead of the barely hidden propaganda previously.