DECEMBER 9 — You would think that by now our government would have learned to understand the differences between satire, parody and sedition.
Alas, no. The entertaining parody Twitter account Bermana is no more, forced offline by MCMC as it was deemed confusing to the masses.
What is more confusing is how Bernama still hasn't seemed to have hired actual humans to do English translations.
I still remember when Bernama translated mayat rentung to “seared corpse” and it took some not-gentle ribbing to have it changed.
Seared is for steak, people, unless of course we start serving human meat at the local steakhouse.
Times are hard. Malaysians need more than ever reason to cheer up, find some silver lining in these dark times.
Bernama's bloopers are so bad an entire Twitter account should be dedicated to them but the reality is our news on a daily basis has reached new “Is this the Onion?” levels of absurd.
Parody sites need to exist because they are a good litmus test as to how we consume media. It is a problem if people take things at face value without attempting to question their veracity or look up other sources.
I make it a point to tell people to vary their news sources as taking your news from just one paper or website means your viewpoints will be very narrow and here's the thing ― media is made and run by people.
People are fallible.
Some news sources are hard to consider credible at all. For instance, Fox News is more a Republican shared-delusion entertainment channel than actual news.
Our local humour scene has devolved to the point where it is difficult to find anything more than safe, slapstick humour on TV or horrible, gimmicky joke phone calls on our radio networks.
Parody websites and Twitter accounts are fun, easy to share with people and a nice respite from how depressing things actually are.
I really think our government should see humour sites as a way for citizens to process reality but alas a former prime minister was so offended at being made a clown caricature he hauled the artist to court.
It shouldn't be a crime to make fun of people; after all, our politicians make a joke of themselves every day. Just last week a politician known for his terrible cooking tutorials shared a new recipe that involved a grilled sandwich and raw mung bean sprouts, otherwise known as taugeh.
Questionable cooking aside, the government should see comedians as doing them a favour. A laughing populace is at least occupied. An angry populace with nothing to laugh about and a lot of time on their hands, well...
The government should hope it never has to find out.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
