The Malaysian Insider

» see themalaysianinsider.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The Malaysian Insider went offline in the first minute of 15 March 2016. The statement had gone out that afternoon under the name of its editor, Jahabar Sadiq: "The Edge Media Group has decided to shut down The Malaysian Insider from midnight today, for commercial reasons." Fifty-nine people were out of work when it took effect.

It had been a free news site in English and Malay, run from Bangsar in Kuala Lumpur since 25 February 2008. Politics was most of it. A staff of reporters wrote the domestic stories and wire copy from Bernama and Reuters filled in the rest. The opinion pages carried a long roster of columnists, most of them no friends of the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition. In June 2009 Alexa ranked it 57th among all sites in Malaysia. By the end it had 227,000 followers on Twitter and more than 424,000 likes on Facebook.

The commercial reasons had a cause with a date on it. Once the block of 25 February cut the site off from most of its Malaysian readers, advertisers stopped buying. The Edge said it had lost RM10 million in the 20 months since it bought the site in June 2014.

~ the dossier ~

~ the eighth birthday ~

The site's own headline that morning was "TMI turns 8, cut off from selected net providers". Readers on Celcom and Unifi, both run by state-controlled companies, got a notice saying the portal had flouted Malaysian law, while some on Maxis could still load it on their phones. "This is an unpleasant surprise," Jahabar said. The regulator, MCMC, cited Section 233 of the Communications and Multimedia Act and national security, and complained of articles based on unidentified sources that "could confuse the public". It also objected to an alternate address the site had set up, which the staff named The Malaysian Outsider.

I know that kind of notice from the other end of Asia. Turkey blocked YouTube by court order from May 2008 to October 2010 and Wikipedia from April 2017 to January 2020, and the mechanics were the same: an instruction goes to the providers, and readers find out from an error page. Turkey's blocks never bankrupted their targets, because YouTube and Wikipedia did not live on Turkish ad sales. A news site whose whole audience sits inside one country has no such cushion, and this one lasted nineteen days.

~ 1mdb ~

The reporting that drew the block was about 1MDB, the state investment fund from which billions went missing, and about the allegations of graft against Prime Minister Najib Razak that came with it. The Malaysian Insider was the second news site his government blocked. Sarawak Report had gone first in July 2015, and when it carried on publishing through Medium, Malaysia blocked Medium as well.

The pressure was older than the block. In March 2015 police arrested three of the site's editors over a report about the Conference of Rulers, and Jahabar was himself held on suspicion of sedition and released without charge.

~ the backers ~

It did not start out as an opposition paper. Png Hong Kwang, a journalist, and Sreedhar Subramaniam, a former chief operating officer of the TV channel ntv7, set it up in December 2007 with money from businessmen close to Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, who wanted a counterweight to Malaysiakini. When Abdullah resigned in 2009 that funding stopped and new backers were found.

Who they were came out in 2019. Jho Low, the financier at the center of the 1MDB case and by then a fugitive, had put US$9 million into The Malaysian Insider in 2010, reportedly to shore up support for Najib's government. Six years later the site was blocked for what it published about the fund he is accused of looting.

Jahabar announced a successor, The Malaysian Insight, in March 2017. The old domain no longer answers.

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