MARCH 27 — March 8, 2014, 12.41am. Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 leaves Kuala Lumpur International Airport for Beijing.
Thirty-eight minutes into the flight, co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid sends what is to be the last pilot communication to Malaysian air traffic control, “All right, good night.” Three minutes later, at 1.21am, the plane’s transponder was turned off. Drowned by the volume of planes in the region, Flight MH370 disappears from civilian radar.
Sixteen days later. After an intensive multi-national investigation and onerous searches over an area larger than the size of Peninsular Malaysia, our prime minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak, held a press conference and announced that with “beyond reasonable doubt”, flight MH370 ended over the Southern Indian Ocean.
Over the period of 16 days, the search for MH370 has become a collective experience for all Malaysians. Even the ones studying overseas. So far, I’ve eavesdropped on conversations of MH370 on the train, engaged with curious and opinionated taxi drivers and even attended UKEC’s PrayForMH370 event held at University College London. It wouldn’t be a pervasive claim to say that we, Malaysians, have come to learn the dispiriting unity of grief.
However, thinking back, in an eerily quiet, empty library in the University of Warwick, “unity in grief” wasn’t the only lesson we learnt first hand from this tragedy.
We learnt that foreign mass media is, above all, a business. In 16 days, we saw foreign news outlets harp on the tragedy of MH370 in a near-overt opportunistic manner.
Australia’s Channel 9 ran a programme on co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid, releasing pictures of him with two female passengers in the cockpit, speculating on the theory that perhaps, the tragedy was due to pilot incompetence. A far-fetched claim to make considering the story ran when authorities were still searching the South China Sea. We didn’t even know it had crashed yet. CNN joined in; Anderson Cooper’s “AC360” focused on the story every day despite the little information that could be confirmed, bringing in any expert who could invent new ways of saying “I don’t know where it is.”
CNN’s prime-time ratings rose by 68 per cent over the year’s average. BBC’s website churned out more articles on MH370, bringing in more traffic to its site than any other story since the Japanese tsunami in 2011. I’m not trying to say that the media shouldn’t cover the tragedy, but it becomes a glaring peculiarity when it becomes noticeable that information outlets thrived on the lack of information.
We also learnt how the words “transparency” and “ineptitude” could take on a life of their own. Before the tragedy, the words came to symbolise the need for reform in Malaysian governance. In some ways, it was properly used during the tragedy.
The release of contradictory statements in the heat of the tragedy is a callous oversight, which revealed an unfortunately great deal of how information is shared between governmental departments.
However, somewhere along the way, the phrase “lack of transparency” was used to describe the lack of information surrounding the tragedy. We began to make unreasonable demands of our government.
Governments cannot release information that they do not have and neither can they release information that they have not verified. Still, the phrase gained traction as criticism hinges on the fact that it takes days before information is released officially or even when the government is thought to be hiding something.
“Ineptitude” became a general word to describe the actual search itself even though the nature of crash site searches at sea is exceptionally challenging. A lot of criticism has been dealt with in hindsight, when the conclusion is far clearer than it had been and when more information had flown in.
People should understand that the nature of this tragedy is unique. The crash site was never recorded, military politics limited flow of information as countries grappled with how much of their surveillance capabilities they should reveal and satellite data is massive and hard to sift through (it flew at night, remember?).
Malaysian governance has a few steps to take before it can be regarded as transparent and efficient but criticism should be levied only when it’s deserved, not out of frustration.
Overall, we learnt that there was so much more we could have done for the grieving family members of those on board flight MH370. Scenes of media journalists rushing towards grieving family members after every press conference were scenes we could have done without. Rumour mills that fuelled false hopes should have been stopped. And the flow of information could have been streamlined.
We learnt that in moments of grief, a lot can be known about ourselves. All in 16 days.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
