PKFZ scandal keeps investigative reporting alive
By uppercaise
It’s publication day today for Citizen Nades (R. Nadeswaran) of The Sun and the book that he and his sidekick Terence Fernandez have put together on the Port Klang Financial Disaster Zone debacle.
Alone in the desolate wilderness of Barisan Nasional’s thought controlled journalism, the pair have over the years chased down countless leads and looked under rocks in their pursuit of fascinating stories.
In the process they’ve put Klang and Port Klang firmly in the political consciousness of Malaysians, first for the story of the infamous Istana Zakaria, the palatial mansion of a one-time town councillor, and now for the Port Klang Financial Disaster Zone.
Ever since they were asked by Ho Kay Tat to become the Sun’s investigative reporting desk, Nades and Terence have run up an impressive string of accomplishments, adding more lustre to their own track record from Balai Berita days.
It was a bold gamble for Kay Tat, as bold as the decision he and his colleagues took to turn the Sun into a freesheet. Kay Tat, once chief reporter of the Old Wing NST-owned Malay Mail, later Reuters correspondent, had then become managing director and editor-in-chief of the Sun during its days as part of the Nexnews-Edge partnership.
In the foreword to Nades’s book, Kay Tat, now boss of The Edge, explains why Nades and Terrence were to be a crucial part of the Sun’s operating editorial philosophy.
We wanted to prove that although we are a free newspaper, we will not be frivolous in our news pages. We focused on where we thought [our competitors] were weak -– strong commentaries and investigative reporting. I formed the Investigative Reporting desk and made [Nades] the head with only one staff – Terence Fernandez.
My message to them was: “Go do what you are best at but make sure you get the facts and story right.” What happened after that was a slew of scoops and special reports on scandals that the Malaysian public had not seen in their newspapers for decades.
‣ From Ho Kay Tat’s foreword
In that Kay Tat was picking up a torch that the Star, primarily, had let slip from its grasp into the embers of Operation Lallang of 1987-89 after having shown the way with investigative reporting and exposes for well over a decade.
Read more at: http://uppercaise.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/pkfz-scandal-citizen-nades-investigative-journalism/
