Bridge over troubled land

When a RM20.43 million bridge was built leading to nowhere, when top secret vaults were used to store furniture, and when goat and cattle semen worth nearly half a million ringgit that was imported from South Africa and Australia was left unused, among other horrendous things, something must be amiss in this beloved land of ours.

And yet sections of the mainstream press in Malaysia seemed to have looked the other way. For instance, “reality bites” for The Star when a sexually active couple made public their private romps on the Internet. The photo of the girl concerned “graced” the front cover of today’s Star, suggesting that this is too important a story to be buried in the inside pages. The rule of thumb, one would assume, is that only stories and pictures of national import seize the front page of any paper worth its salt.