Outside of politics, current affairs, sports and business, the last few weeks have also seen a couple of interesting, almost “esoteric”, news pieces in our print and online dailies.
In the Dewan Rakyat, it was disclosed that the Health Ministry has developed a standard for homeopathic medical studies. Other than the sad fact that the ministry is now very much an accommodationist with regards to alternative medicine (note to the ministry: if a treatment works, it would just be called medicine), one can only hope that it covers trauma and A&E (Accident and Emergency) as well because that would certainly make it a world’s first.
Furthermore, the ministry also said it would now entertain homeopathy research allocation requests—definitely a world’s first among government ministries.
Certainly, if any research is to be done on homeopathy, it has to be related to proving its efficacy, not in furthering a discipline whose principles have remained unchanged since Samuel Hahnemann first proposed the “Law of Similars” in 1796, before the Germ Theory of Disease became a cornerstone of modern medicine.
Then on July 18, an Indian astrologist declared that Malaysia is “very blessed” thanks to its auspicious (notorious word, that) geo-location in relation to the solar system. Pluto’s fairly recent non-planet status in astronomy is not a deal breaker, we can safely assume.
The same seer also said that Malaysia’s future lay in “space research” and that our airspace would be much in demand for other nation’s prototype space inventions due to our 12-hour time difference with Nasa. How exactly that factoid accounted for a favourable review was not immediately disclosed.
Also, the Majlis Ulema Indonesia (MUI) issued a fatwa overriding its earlier March edict that “rectifies” the nation’s qiblat or compass direction facing Mecca. Interesting, considering the spherical nature of our planet should be enough to indicate that one can’t face straight at anything beyond the curvature of the Earth—except perhaps the International Space Station on a good day.
Or, that to be strictly two-dimensional about it once and for all, the authorities could just incorporate inch-perfect global positioning system (GPS) co-ordinates in a fatwa so every other co-ordinate on Earth can easily point to a no-line-of-sight straight line to the Masjidil Haram.
Yup, it’s never a dull moment for people who satiate their news and information gathering habit using Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and other Internet-enabled methods of collection available to the super-connected in this day and age.
But it wasn’t just all that. We also had “businessman” Raja Noor Jan Shah Raja Tuan Shah emerge again since his 2005 first-round stunt to renew his claim to the Malacca throne; this time seeking the recognition of the Conference of Malay Rulers ahead of the 500th anniversary of the Portuguese invasion in August.
Great public relations timing, it must be said.
And to top it all off, apparently two Persian cats tragically died in a Penang apartment blaze. Their charred carcasses were discovered by firemen who “took three minutes” to put out the fire on Friday evening.
The local Twitterverse certainly erupted with disdain and ridicule at the last two news items, with Twitteratis questioning just how slow a news day it must have been.
Don’t get me wrong. Just like many of you, I’m fully behind the exercise of putting all manner of information out there and letting people sort out their own wheat from chaff.
After all, one man’s meat is another man’s poison.
But in the interest of preserving some degree of incredulity and not to mention quality, there must be types of information that just shouldn’t be classified or treated as serious by our news aggregators and editorial decision-makers unless it’s tabloid appeal they’re gunning for.
Like it or not, the news, because it still continues to bestow clout and credibility on information, can also give false legitimacy when none may in fact be deserved.
It’s bad enough that propaganda does pretty much the same thing—and we certainly had a good dose of it when the government subsidies for gas, petrol and sugar were relaxed last week (see, even I’m doing it here)—but when even questionable disciplines and practices are given equal time and respect in the interest of “fairness,” we’ve got a something akin to a runaway train effect.
Indeed, it was said that the scholars during the time when the Gutenberg press was invented in the 15th century also worried that mass printing was going to mean that people could start printing all manner of stuff and that false information would be the norm.
In light of that argument, I’d take the tragic death of the two Persian cats in a condominium fire in Penang and the royal lineage claims story as legitimate news—not in the least because of readership interest value mind you; but at the most because both are based on fact.
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