Ridhuan Tee at it again / Utusan on Sunday outsells Star

Posted by hartalmsm on January 19, 2011 · 26 Comments 

By Hartal MSM

Uppercaise and Sakmongkol in their Jan 16 postings updated respectively on the newspaper circulation numbers and kind of readership. We’re adding our 2 sen here on the Icker factor.

uppercaise blogged:

‘Metro, Sin Chew are tops, NST bottoms below 80,000‘

Citing the Audit Bureau of Circulation, uppercaise posted a list of the Top 10-selling papers.

Metro leads the pack with its Sunday edition topping the table and its weekday edition at (3). Rival Malay tabloid Kosmo! places (10) for Sunday edition and (11) for  weekday edition.

In some surprise over how well the Malay tabloid sales are doing, Sakmongkol describes the characteristics of these papers: “… Kosmo, Harian Metro, those mosquito papers written in Malay which are big on sensational stories about artistes’ lives and ghost stories and with the appealing mix of sex, violence and romance are doing well?”

Datuk Sak forgot to mention that their sports coverage — besides the pop singers and starlets spread — also help sell the papers.

Our interest lies in the fourth bestseller; (4) is the Sunday edition of Utusan. The daily Utusan however has slipped to 12th spot with a circulation of 157,831 copies. But how come the Sunday version is nonetheless going strong (almost double its sister weekday paper’s sales) at 370,000 copies?

Sak opines that “… on Sundays, the most popular segment of Mingguan Malaysia is Pancaindera“. We would agree with his assessment of Utusan‘s weekend entertainment pullout (featuring celebrity gossip) as having a lot of mass appeal.

However, we’re also bearing in mind that Utusan on Sunday carries its weekly dose of race poison in the editorial voice Awang Selamat and Chinese-basher extraordinaire Mohd Ridhuan Tee bin Abdullah.

Ridhuan Tee

Sakmongkol commented:

“Just a few weeks ago, the president of NUJ [Hata Wahari] offered some very damning thoughts on the reasons for the overall decline in newspaper circulation. Example: the principal cause for the decline in Utusan Malaysia‘s circulation is its racist tilt. In other words, Utusan Malaysia is racist.

.

Coming from a Malay against a Malay vernacular paper is almost blasphemous!”

We’re all by now acquainted with the fact that the one public personality who hits out at the Chinese the hardest is a Chinese himself (or perhaps we should more accurately say was born Chinese).

In his Jan 16 column ‘Gabungan 1Malaysia‘, Ridhuan compared Chinese here with those in Indonesia and why our neighbours who are descended from the Chinese race are, in his opinion, ‘no longer Chinese’. He wrote (excerpt):

Orang Cina Indonesia sudah tidak lagi kelihatan seperti orang Cina seperti di Malaysia. Indonesia mengamalkan asimilasi secara paksaan bermula tahun 1965, apabila jatuhnya rejim komunis pimpinan Sukarno.

Suharto yang menggantikan Sukarno mengambil tindakan drastik memutuskan hubungan orang Cina Indonesia dengan negara asalnya secara kekerasan. Asimilasi dilaksanakan seratus peratus. Cara hidup orang Cina diubah sepenuhnya menjadi orang Indonesia termasuk dari segi nama, pakaian, bahasa, sambutan perayaan dan segala cara hidup yang lain. Rancangan televisyen, radio, filem, sekolah, makalah, perayaan kebesaran dan sebagainya yang ada berbau kecinaan diharamkan. Proses ‘pengIndonesiaan’ berlaku secara ekstrem. Tujuannya tidak lain, untuk membina sebuah negara bangsa. Hal ini tidak banyak bezanya dengan apa yang berlaku di Thailand dan Filipina, tetapi tidak seagresif Indonesia.

Hari ini, orang Cina Indonesia tidak lagi seperti orang Cina.

Pix: If all in Malaysia adopted ‘national’ names like the Indonesians, what would be hers? Haniza?

As Ridhuan has liked to point out countless times before, the assimilation of Chinese in Indonesia was carried out with 100 percent thoroughness.

“The lifestyle of the Chinese is fully transformed to become Indonesian including in name, dressing, language, celebration of festivals and other aspects of life. Television and radio programmes, films, school, periodicals, big festive occasions and other events that have Chinese elements were banned.”

Of course, trust Ridhuan to omit any mention that today after the fall of Suharto, whose long rule imposed the obliteration of Chinese identity, Indonesia’s suppressed minority community is desperately seeking their roots once again.

A fortnight ago, we posted on why we thought Ridhuan was kinda scary. Utusan on Sunday prominently highlighting his articles and the solid circulation figures that show the paper reaches, say, a million-plus readers — more than The Star, Sunday Star and The Sun — is equally scary.

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* How to Calculate Readership: Circulation is the number of newspapers that are printed and distributed each day. Readership reflects the actual number of people who read those newspapers.

Filed under Icker-tee, Poodle, Print Media, Utusan, You don't say · Tagged with Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC), Awang Selamat, circulation, Hannah Yeoh, Harian Metro, Hata Wahari, Kosmo!, NUJ, Pancaindera, Ridhuan Tee, Sakmongkol, sales, Uppercaise, Utusan