I POSED the question for an Asean newspaper to a group of participants at the first Asean Civil Society Conference in 2005. Recently, I voiced a similar concern on the glue cementing popular connections and consciousness among peoples in the region.
This was during the seminar titled “Asean Futures: Navigating Regionalism, Reconciliation, and Rapproachment”, organised by International Islamic University Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur on Sept 2.
It drove the point on the importance of popular and civilisational consciousness in Asean. The six decades of existence must go beyond community cohesiveness. The media has been overlooked.
A common Asean media (not social media), operating through various platforms, including, television, apart from print — and not forgetting an Asean Radio — that can be accessed online is truly essential.
In other words, the Asean media would be a communication instrument, based in any number of member nations, using the various platforms accessible to the Asean citizenry in a common language (or languages) chosen by the group, and understood by the majority of the Asean population.
We have to put aside elitism and linguistic nationalism. At the same time, the Asean media can/should also be transmitted in the local languages.
Indonesian information minister Harmoko first made the call for an Asean newspaper in 1989. He argued that the medium would enhance the organisation’s credibility and work towards common objectives.
His call was aimed at countering the information imbalance from Western media.
Harmoko’s suggestion was made in the midst of debates on a “New World Information and Communication Order”, championed in the late 1970s and early 1980s through Unesco by the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).
However, NAM’s move faced resistance and failed to gain widespread acceptance.
The principle behind an Asean media is to, among others, mitigate global media inequality and misrepresentation.
An Asean radio or newspaper would allow for democratisation of voices in the cultural and inter-civilisational sense.
In this regard, Asean may shift its trajectory from a state and nation-centric approach, to an intra and inter-civilisational approach in reconstructing the Southeast Asia region.
The questions we can ask are: Who consumes the knowledge of Asean?; What is being consumed?; and what level of that knowledge of Asean that is consumed?
The recent global emergence of the construct of civilisational determination augurs well for an Asean media concept and operationalisation in a multipolar world. In this sense, quality journalism matters. Opinion-editorial pieces transmitted collectively from Asean becomes a critical tool for public diplomacy.
In its aspirations to be a people-centred community, Asean must have media transmitted, circulated and consumed within the region and, at the same time, communicating and connecting to the rest of the world.
At one time, a page or a section in the national dailies/and the broadcast media devoted to news from and about Asean.
But even with those initiatives, do we now know and have access to events, processes and trends, cultures and identities in other Asean countries? With social media, have things improved?
Social media platforms do not replace professional journalism and media. Asean must make efforts to consolidate the dimension and level of information of each nation-state.
The Asean media must be a platform for not only regional, but also more significant inter-civilisational dialogues.
Not knowing our neighbours is as much as not knowing ourselves as part of the Asean entity.
This is disempowerment. Ignorance and ambivalence deny us the consciousness that thrived in this geographical and civilisational space even before Asean came into being.
Asean may not have a distinctive legal persona like the European Union; but the historical evolution of Southeast Asia has made Asean assume a distinctive personality.
* The writer is Professor of Social and Intellectual History, Centre for Malay-Islamic Civilisational Studies, International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilisation (CMICS-ISTAC) Kuala Lumpur
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