News Reporting on Religious Issues: Malaysian Media Practitioners’ Perspective

Abstract

The nature of a multiracial and multireligious community is all about concern and awareness from all levels in the society. The differences of thoughts, beliefs and understanding requires tolerance over almost all factors including political and economic sectors. While the people agreed to the contents of the Federal Constitution, conflicts on race and religion continue to happen from time to time. Being the watchdog of the ruling party, it is not new for the Malaysian media practitioners to be in a dilemma in shaping the content in reporting controversial issues. Hence, this paper intends to study the perspectives of the media practitioners in Malaysia in shaping the content when reporting on religious issues such as the apostasy case of Lina Joy and the translation of ‘God’ to ‘Allah’ issue. Using a qualitative method, in-depth interviews were conducted with the media practitioners; journalists and editors of two mainstream newspapers, The Star and Utusan Malaysia. The results show that all of them have a mutual understanding of what they should and should not write in their reporting considering the background of Malaysian society. This is also understood when they are aware of the rules and regulations restricted in the contents of their reports for national security purposes. Keywords: Race, religion, media, news reporting, plural society.