How To Stop Reading The Star

Well, not just the The Star but The Straits Times as well (if anybody still actually pays for that propaganda sheet).

Of course, you're going to say "you mean you just realized they're propaganda sheets?".
I've known it for ages but old habits are hard to break. I need my newspaper with my roti canai every morning. Of course I knew I must stop supporting these people. They insult my intelligence every morning. Every  article is pro-government. Every article is written in a condescending manner and appear to be designed to cater to the lobotomised. There is no partisan analysis of any political issue or situation. And they are just plain boring, tasteless and lifeless.

A case in point is that a day after the 2nd post-mortem on the poor gentleman who died in police custody, The Stars headline blared that the Home Minister had done a remarkable job on his KPIs. No mention at all of the death in custody. Perhaps preventing deaths in custody wasn't part of his KPIs. Or was it a blatant attempt to take attention away from that very issue?
Baradan Kuppusamy in The Star meanwhile, keeps up an unending series of negative articles on the opposition with no regard, it would seem, to journalistic ethics. Shouldn't an analytical article provide both sides of the argument? Don't you have to believe in what you're writing anymore?

PKRs direct elections, to give another example, came in for remarkable negative reporting in the mainstream media; while pointedly ignoring the fact that those much maligned elections make it the most democratic political party in Malaysia today.

All pretence at being a free, bipartisan paper; a cynical pose that they adopted post March 2008; has been gaily abandoned. The lesson of 2008 is forgotten and they are back to treating the electorate as pliant and credulous creatures, ever willing to be manipulated as they wish. They may yet again find themselves mistaken.

So, is The Star stupid? Or do they just think that I (and my fellow habitual newspaper buyers) are stupid? Do they believe that we have no access to alternative news? Twitter? Am I in a banana republic?

In any event, I now carry magazines, books, even work, to breakfast every morning. Its not so hard to stop, after all.
If your restaurant carries a free copy of the mainstream newspapers, then go ahead and indulge yourself.

But don't give them your hard-earned Ringgit 1.20.