10-minute airtime offer still stands, so what?
According to Rais again, the door is still open and he encouraged them utilize the airtime for the sake of "democracy". For the sake of "democracy", what a joke indeed! He called a 10-minutes airtime a democracy? Truly the greatest joke on earth. So much as prime minister and Umno president Datuk Najib Razak's earlier promise to make Malaysia "the best democracy in the world".
This is for everyone of us to know, just in case some of us are not aware of their contributions and rights. The facts here is, all the television channels currently being managed by RTM are fully funded by the people's money (we pay our income tax every year). As such, the Opposition parties too have their rights to access these channels at anytime of their convenience. And our people has the right too to seek such information via these RTM channels.
But, what really is happening now is, the BN federal government shut out the Opposition parties all the time and only recently, they are offering a 10-minute airtime for each of everyone of them to air their party manifestos for the GE13, while BN occupies all these channels the whole day to promote their own propaganda, party manifesto and at the same time paint a negative pictures of the Opposition parties through their media spins so freely.
Then, we want to ask this Rais again, is this call "democracy" when those channels are being fully occupied by your party all the time? What is "for the sake of democracy" in your point of view here? The problem here is, the BN government does not feel secure at all to let the Oppositions use "their" RTM channels to air later's presentation to our people so that the electorate would be able to review them and to affirm their decisions in the general elections.
In a real democracy, it should be a natural occurrence for the ruling party as well as the Oppositions to have equal coverage in the media daily. However, such principle has been hijacked by the BN rulers and what even made worst are these BN component parties also own most of the newspapers as well as the other media companies.
Apart from the 10-minute airtime for the Oppositions, the conditions are, the presentation would only be recorded first, then censored, and only then, it would be publish live on the selected channels, not all channels.
In this case, it shows that the BN government has been insincere in its offer to the Oppositions to use the government-owned television channels for the purpose of election campaigning.
