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UPDATED VERSION. It was a night where we four had too much to share and too short the time.

At the studio after the live telecast...(L-to-R) Siad Huey, Jeff, YB Lau and Kuik

Anchorperson Siad Huey was forthcoming when she named Noh Omar in her quotes about the controversy related to Chinese schools the deputy education minister recently stirred up in the Parliament. She said mainstream media, especially those catering to the Chinese community, was put on a tight spot when issues such as this was anticipated by the readers, but due to sanitised reporting -- not knowing whether it was due to media control -- people resort to the online media such as Merdeka Review, for alternative views.

I had a lot of respect for Kuik, the senior editor at Sin Chew. I had expected him to be an echo chamber in support of media control as he works in Malaysia's largest circulation Chinese newspaper,whose printing and publications licenses were suspended for months during the Lalang Operation, 1987. However, when I 'challenged' him and the mainstream media, instead of clamping down on online media, to fight for more freedom under the Print Presses and Publications Act, he said the 'struggle' has been a sustaining process, albeit behind the scene. However, he said controlling the media is a practice no longer tenable as the world is moving towards a higher level of transparency.

Often times, he said, whenever there were instruction from the power that be to kill-off certain stories, or whenver ministers said they had been misquoted by the Press, it was done in a manner of haste, and readers were left clueless of what actually happened, and doubts prescipitated. It's here that mainstream media must manoeivre to protect its credibility, he said.

Lau, on the other had, advocated regulating the media, be there mainstream or online as prevailing laws are already sufficient in dealing with issues that violate law and order. Hwoever, he thought that controlling and monitoring the media is bad as the country moves towards the Knowledge Economy, an area he had researched in the last ten years. You can Google him on this.

As a blogger, I said you can't make a broad stroke to demonise all bloggers and online media operators.There is a distinction between the penembak curi and those who blog with full-blown public identity, people like me, A Kadir Jasin and Ahirudin 'Rocky' Attan. That's credibility in action. Bloggers like us have been professional and ressponsibility since Day One we started blogging in the belief that we could use Internet positively to connect with our readers.

When Siad Huey related to tussles with The NST in 2004 and early this year, and with theSun recently, Lau jumped in to say that if bloggers were to be kopitiam operators, should the customers misbehave, who would you prosecute -- the kopitiam owners or the customers?

The producer ended the segment by airing the results of a street poll related to the live telecast topic conducted by the What Say You crew. It indicates that 53% vs.36% of the people tend to trust the online mediamore than the mainstream media.

I thought that was an encouaging statement about what has taken place on the ground.

Original Blog

This blogger will speak in the What Say You ( 你怎么说 Mandarin Forum) live telecast from 7 to 8pm tonight over TV2.

The topic is on Mainstream vs. Online Media: The Question of Credibility and Responsibility.

Fellow speakers are Johor State Assemblyman (BN: Gerakan) for Pemanis, Lau Chin Hoon, and Sin Chew Daily Deputy Executive Editor-in-Chief Kuik Cheng Kang.

Lau, who was trained in molecular genetics, is an Internet visionary who wrote about the concept of 'Internet Biologists and the Continuity in Virtual Knowledge Network', while Kuik and I first met way back in 1994.

The anchor/moderator is Lee Sian Huey, a practising lawyer.

There is call-in interaction with the viewers.