Bersih: Whom does media serve?

IN 2001, after three years of investigations and interviewing hundreds of journalists, leading media practitioners Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel wrote The Elements of Journalism, now a reference point for what is good journalism.
One of Kovach and Rosenstiel’s principles was that a journalist’s first loyalty is to citizens. Not its owners, advertisers or even consumers, but “to a social obligation that at times overrides their employers’ immediate interests…” The authors also quoted former Washington Post publisher Eugene Meyer who said this: “In pursuit of the truth, the newspaper shall be prepared to make sacrifices of its material fortunes, if such a course be necessary for the public good.”
But whom did the Malaysian traditional media serve in their recent coverage of the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections (Bersih 2.0) and its 9 July 2011 rally? What would the reporting have looked like if the media had lived up to their social obligation to inform the people fairly, comprehensively and accurately of Bersih-related events? And what did the coverage instead look like?
How our media performed
Here is some information that would have helped the public make up their own minds about Bersih 2.0. Against that is an assessment of how some of the traditional media performed.
* Bersih’s demands
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