Did we know what Ustaz Ramlang Porigi did last night?

The blogs (see, for e.g. here), websites and newsportal were abuzz since early this morning with the Ramlang’s ‘revelation’ that cast doubt over the recent Saiful swearing, something that any student of journalism would deem newsworthy.

And yet, when you glanced through some of the mainstream newspapers you would think that the Ramlang’s press conference was a mere figment of the new media’s imagination. These papers were either ‘silent’ on this ‘revelation’ or they downplayed it.

The Star, for example, buried the Ramlang appearance on page N28 in its northern edition with a coy-like headline, ‘Imam: Don’t blame me’, an item that might have a page-one potential even. Star online has this news item at the bottom of its virtual page.

Berita Harian‘s website did not post this news.

A check on Bernama’s website this morning shows that the Ramlang revelation apparently did not catch the eye of the national news agency.

The agency however did post an item that looks more like an opinion piece titled, ‘Swearing by the Quran strikes fear among the Malays’. The piece merely tries to reinforce what is claimed as important to the Malay community, i.e. swearing on the Quran.

If swearing is indeed an important and fearful thing for the Malay community, then what was said by Ustaz Ramlang should be all the more important for the community and non-Malays to be informed, and therefore be reported by the news agency.

And yet, Bernama and other mainstream newspapers seemed to have chosen to look the other way, at least at the time of posting this. Even if the Ramlang revelation might have missed the press time of some of the mainstream newspapers as it happened past midnight, their online editions however would have got it.