When compassion speaks louder than confrontation

With race relations at a critical point in Malaysia, the mass media, together with community organisations, have a key role to play in looking beyond confrontation, says FMT executive chairman Nelson Fernandez.

Speaking at a public forum on social media and the young, he said “everyone talks about religion, but no one talks about love, compassion and kindness. Everything is confrontational. How can we speak about religion and confrontation in the same breath?”

The process towards overcoming confrontation must first begin in newsrooms. “Conflict is part of news. It should not become the only news,” he said at the New Muslim Community Conference yesterday.

The respect that news organisations hoped to encourage among Malaysians must first be practised by the journalists producing the news. “Better reporting on race and religion begins with our own culture (in the office). How we treat one another, how we make editorial decisions, and whether we apply the same standards to everyone.”

Fernandez said this was why he believed in respect rather than merely tolerating those who were different. “Tolerance can simply mean putting up with people we disagree with, but respect requires something more – an effort to understand, to engage fairly, and to recognise the dignity of others.”

Having people from different backgrounds working together in a newsroom also mattered, as one journalist might recognise a religious or cultural sensitivity another had missed, question the impression created by a headline, or flag missing context.

When race did not matter

For Fernandez, one event showed what could happen when Malaysians rose above race to practise compassion.

A middle-aged woman walked into the office sobbing as she sought help to raise funds for a young girl suffering from severe and painful spasms, he said.

Within hours of FMT producing a report on the girl, Diya Amanda, readers had contributed RM150,000 while the wider fundraising effort eventually helped make her surgery possible.

“The woman from the NGO who came and pleaded in my office was Chinese,” Fernandez recounted. “The writer, the senior editor whom I assigned to do the story, was Indian. The little girl and her family were Malay. Not that it mattered to us.”

Neither, he said, did it seem to matter to the Malaysians who came forward to help. “To me, this reflects the vast unity that exists in our country.”

Fernandez said the Diya Amanda story showed “the value of having a strong platform and an audience that trusts you, not only in how many people read the story, but also in what that story enables people to do.”

It was also a reminder that journalism could be part of that healing process, not by ignoring divisions or difficult issues, but by ensuring they do not become the only stories Malaysians tell about one another.

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