Kam Raslan’s Talking Edge

(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 25 July 2011 issue)

Dear Kam,
What could the Jews possibly gain by infiltrating Malaysia? We don’t even have a functioning LRT. Is it the palm oil?
Sense & Sensibility

Probably the finest newspaper in our roll-call of magnificent newspapers has finally detected the reason behind our recent political upheavals: The Jews are trying to infiltrate Malaysia. This makes perfect sense, but I don’t know where. I mean, really? The Jews? Trees died for this?

Our newspapers are not actually the worst in the world. If they had some competition then they could be judged, but instead they have a job to do and they tell the stories they have to tell. They are what they are. The worst newspapers in the world are the muck-raking UK tabloids and the worst of them was, until recently, Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World. He closed it down recently in an attempt to defuse the phone-hacking scandal that is threatening his media empire, News International. By suddenly closing the newspaper he made a couple of hundred people unemployed, but there won’t be much sympathy for them because they spent their working lives trying to destroy the lives of others.

For those of you who don’t know, the UK’s phone-hacking scandal happened because it was exposed that News of the World journalists and private investigators had hacked into the phones of hundreds, possibly thousands of celebrities, politicians, victims of crime, families of dead soldiers, and so on. The worst case was when a 13-year-old girl called Milly Dowler went missing. The journalists accessed the missing girl’s phone messages and listened. Presumably the messages were from distraught friends and family hoping the girl would return. Unfortunately for the journalists, the messages became full, so they decided to delete some in order to get more juicy messages. The girl’s family realised that messages were being deleted and thought that she must still be alive. She was not and her body was found soon after.

The shocking story of the News of the World crimes were finally exposed by the Guardian newspaper, and all hell has broken loose. In order to look like they were doing something, News International set up an internal enquiry, which, as we all know, is the best way to get at the “truth.” The person who was put in charge of the internal enquiry was Rebekah Brooks, who was the editor of News of the World during the time of the Milly Dowler murder. The actor Hugh Grant played a role in exposing the News of the World crimes by secretly recording a candid conversation with an ex-journalist. When he was asked if he thought Rebekah Brooks would reveal the truth, he said it was like asking if Hitler was the best person to clean up the Nazi party.

Since then Rebekah Brooks has resigned, London’s two most senior policemen have also resigned and Rupert Murdoch and his mediocre son have been questioned by MPs at Parliament. Rupert Murdoch took the opportunity to sing the praises of Singapore, but the event became briefly exciting when a man threw something at Rupert Murdoch, at which point his wife (who comes from China) instantly leapt over several people and smacked the man in the face, which was very impressive, and a bit scary.

I grew up in the UK before I returned to Malaysia and I was happy to get away from the disgusting tabloids. They spent their energies digging up pointless dirt on B-grade celebrities and calling it news. They seemed to delight in destroying lives and they had the resources to crush anybody. A photograph of a friend of mine once appeared in the best-selling Sun newspaper. The caption said she was somebody else and that she was a prostitute. My friend tried to sue but the newspaper’s lawyers basically said that she could try but they would ruin her financially, so she had to give up.

The Guardian is a very good newspaper, it is one of the best, but maybe it has to work harder to be good in order to distinguish itself from the others, which are so very bad. Newspapers around the world have struggled to deal with the Internet and sales have plummeted. But Malaysia will buck that trend when the market eventually opens up.

UK tabloids are the worst newspapers in the world because they operate in a land with such freedoms, and yet they choose to waste their opportunities by hacking into phones, rummaging through people’s garbage (metaphorically and literally) and by being bullies. They don’t realise that freedom of speech is so very precious and can never be taken for granted.

Dear Kam,
I think we have too many meetings where I work. I’m always in meetings talking about the work but I don’t have any time to actually do the work. What should I do?
Time Manager

There can be too many meetings, and sometimes they go on and on and on. And at the end of it everyone is in agreement, but only because they want to get out of there. It’s possible that I dreamt this, but I think I read somewhere that somebody had done a study of bad political and business decisions and it was found that most of them had been made after meetings that had lasted several hours and after midnight. I think that if something cannot be decided in 45 minutes, then there is a fundamental problem and that needs to be addressed, in another meeting.

Technology can sometimes make the matter worse. In the old days, it was a big event to make a phone call across to the other side of the world, but now it’s cheap and easy. Tele-conferencing means that it is possible to have global meetings, but with all the various time differences, it means that the working day never ends. It’s going to be very late or very early for somebody. I can work quite well until very late, but I’m basically non-functioning in the morning. I’ll agree to you invading Poland before 10am, but I’ll fight you on the beaches after 5pm.

Another problem with tele-conferencing is that you cannot see anybody’s face. We instinctively get a lot of important information and we try to get responses from people’s faces and body language. I was once in a fairly big meeting when the brand-new boss fell asleep. Nobody had the courage to wake him up and the 20 people around the table gradually stopped talking because nobody knew what to do. If he had fallen asleep during a tele-conference then we would have thought he was being quiet and thoughtful, and we wouldn’t have known that he was fast asleep. Maybe tele-conferences are a good idea after all.

Reprinted with the kind permission of