“A crucial pillar of authoritarian rule is control of information. Through blogs (there are currently more than a hundred million worldwide), blog sites, online chat rooms, and more formal online media, the Internet provides dramatic new possibilities for pluralizing flows of information and widening the scope of commentary, debate, and dissent.
One of the most successful instances of the latter type is Malaysiakini, an online newspaper that has become Malaysia’s principal alternative source of news and commentary.6 As Freedom House has documented, Malaysia lacks freedom of the press. The regime (both the state and the ruling Barisan Nasional [BN] coalition) dominates print and broadcast media through direct ownership and monopoly practices. Thus it can shape what Malaysians read and see, and it can punish critical journalists with dismissal. Repressive laws severely constrain freedom to report, publish, and broadcast. However, as a rapidly developing country with high literacy, Malaysia has witnessed explosive growth of Internet access (and recently, broadband access), from 15 percent of the population in 2000 to 66 percent in 2009 (equal to Taiwan and only slightly behind Hong Kong).7 The combination of tight government control of the conventional media, widespread Internet access, and relative freedom on the Internet created an opening for online journalism in Malaysia, and two independent journalists—Steven Gan and Premesh Chandran—ventured into it. Opponents of authoritarian rule since their student days, Gan and Chandran became seized during the 1998 reformasi period with the need to reform the media and bring independent news and reporting to Malaysia. Using about US$9,000 of their own money (a tiny fraction of what it would take to start a print newspaper), they launched Malaysiakini in November 1999. Almost immediately, they gained fame by exposing how an establishment newspaper had digitally cropped jailed opposition leader (and former deputy prime minister) Anwar Ibrahim from a group photo of ruling-party politicians.