The Malaysian Press Council : towards striking a balance between public interest and freedom of press

Abstract

Article 10 of the Federal Constitution guarantees the right of freedom of the press in Malaysia, subject to several restrictions. Regardless, these restrictions have been viewed as repressive, which impedes freedom of the press in Malaysia. In the meantime, despite those restrictions are abled by laws, there are genuine cases that the press is in excesses in their function that threatened the public interest. The dilemma to strike a balance between the two extremes dictates the need for a new regulatory mechanism to be established; of which the main objective of this research. The researcher identifies that a Press Council is a suitable mechanism for that role. Regardless, a Press Council is yet to be a reality in Malaysia despite it was first proposed in the 1970s which is much attributed to disagreements among its stakeholders on its independence and its regulatory framework. In this research, the researcher had conducted several case studies on the existing regulatory models comprises of self-regulatory, statutory, and co-regulatory. In pursuance to this, the researcher has selected several existing press and media councils that employs those respective regulatory models as the benchmark to the study including but not limited to; the United Kingdom’s press regulatory framework, the Press Council of India, and the Danish Press Council as part of this thesis research objective. In addition to that, the researcher also looks into local regulatory bodies such as the Malaysian Communication and Multimedia Commission, Advertising Standards Advisory Malaysia and others. This research employs a qualitative method, which predominantly relies on library based and semi-structural interviews approach to achieve the above objectives. This study found that there is a crucial need to establish a press council in Malaysia and identified that a co-regulatory model is an ideal framework for the Council. The study also concludes that there are several law reforms need to be done to pave a way for its establishment.