Comparison of Three Local Newspapers Covering the Same Story Shocks Malaysians

In a recent Facebook post, Francis Yirkadi CT took pictures of three separate dailies with a similar story but noted each of their headlines. He pointed out that in comparison to The Star and Berita Harian, Metro had angled their title to skew public perception of the actual story.

This had created a stir in netizens as they bombard the post with comments on how irresponsible it is of Harian Metro to write an over-sensationalized headline.

Reports by the Star described how a 16-year old student’s pet dog found the abandoned baby and alerted its owner to it. In short, we could consider the dog as the hero in this story. However, Metro wrote otherwise and blatantly highlight the wrong facts, titling the same story as “Almost devoured by dog” along with the subtitle of “New born boy who’s left inside box almost becomes animal food.”

Malaysians express their outrage at the inaccurate reporting and sympathized how the dog who was supposedly the ‘hero’ ended up as the villian.

A journalist explains that Metro’s main purposes here was to capture people’s attention albeit being fake news.

One netizen joked, “Soalan bonus: Siapa lagi anjing? Editor Suratkhabar Metro atau Anjing yang selamatkan bayi ini?”

However, this is not the first time newspaper headlines have caused uproar among Malaysians. This clamor began when Kosmo! and Berita Harian reported that the badminton mixed pair won sekadar silver during the 2016 Olympics in Rio De Janeiro.

Besides that, the dailies also mentioned how the pair has disappointed millions of Malaysians. Our rakyat were extremely upset at the papers as the two dailies belittle them for not winning gold medals. They quickly came to defend our wira wirawati through social media.

Many expressed their fury on Facebook and Twitter. Some typed out foul languages asking the writer and editor to balik sekolah belajar. Some netizens even stated that the reporter should try for the Olympics to see how tough it is. It is not everyday that someone wins a medal in the Olympics.

However, apparently Kosmo! still did not get the hint as they wrote this headline anyways.

Luckily for us, other newspapers weren’t as stupid negative as Kosmo! and wrote about DLCW’s olympic results more positively. The Star writes from a more uplifting angle that cheers on our beloved Dato’.