Yellow Spin

Today is the bumper harvest for comical spin in Malaysia. Anyone with half a brain and access to anything other than the official news media can see the funny stories being told by our government and enjoy a good laugh. For students of political science, it is also interesting to see how the Malaysian government does it's version of spin. Very funny leh, some of the things that they choose to say.

According to TheStar and NST, only about 4,000 people gathered at the rally. FUNNY!!! If you ask the people at the rally, they will easily tell you that the government's official number is about an order of magnitude off. The real number was probably nearer to 40,000 than 4,000. In fact, if you trust the main stream media, TV3 reported (below), that 4,000 police personnel were brought in to control the crowd. If they want to spin the story, they should at least give out a consistent story to all their spin agencies.

Then, you look at the numbers of people being arrested. According to the mainstream press, about 245 people were arrested and released on bail. According to the other mainstream media and alternative media, the real numbers are about an order of magnitude smaller, more like 25 than 245. FUNNY!!!

Our government should really get their act together. It makes them look silly when their spin agencies are not presenting the same story. I guess that this is a little too much for our Information Minister to handle. He's busy trying to attack foreign news agencies and point out that we're neither Myanmar or Pakistan (even though our news items were featured side-by-side).

Funny leh.. Funny!! We suck at spin, man! Malaysian spin is always so funny and totally unbelievable. I guess that when you put jokers in office, you end up getting jokes.