The tensions inherent in the public representation of complex issues - Essay Example

The newspapers, television channels and the internet were filled with various speculations about the incident. As usual the inefficiency of the government was criticized heavily. The lack of transparency in the Malaysian governments operation, their subdued efforts to keep the relatives of the missing informed and the lack of any guaranteed report about hijack or crash fueled the media wheels effortlessly. They represented the issue as if it was the sole mistake of the Malaysian government. The frustrated relatives of the missing people were shown mourning constantly in every TV channel.

The issue was represented in such a way flight travel in South Asian countries is risky, as the governments there function passively and are non-transparent. The discretion of President Razak in handling the issue with the domestic means he had and his timely decision to use the help from Australia, a country quite near the crash site rather than the US situated on the other half of the world, went unmentioned in nearly all the reports. As John Berger (1972) mentions, "what the modern means of reproduction have done is to destroy the authority".

The international media reproduction about a flight crash simply crushed the image of a well developed country into that of a poor backward country without any authorization of proof. The influences of such representation were so high, that even the stock market of the country underwent a great blow. The way the issue was represented in the international media was absolutely partial and judgmental. The media highly overshadowed the diplomatic efforts taken by the Malaysian government to search for the flight on a multinational level, highlighting its efforts to decline help from the US government.

This led to the extent of the US President Obama reconsidering his trip to Malaysia due to security reasons. Several rumors about a couple of people travelling