By Dr Rahim Said
There is a peculiar genre of crime reporting in Malaysia that deserves its own syllabus. Not criminology, mind you — but creative ambiguity.
A body is found. The word “brutal” is deployed with confidence. A motive is announced with finality. Suspects are detained. Case solved. Curtain down. Please move along, nothing more to see here.
Take the recent report carried by an English-language daily that began its operations in Penang in the 1970s. It was republished across platforms: a woman is found dismembered in Indah Permai. Two suspects — father and son — are arrested within hours. The police say jealousy is the motive. And that, apparently, is that.
Except it isn’t. Jealousy of what? Between whom?
What was the relationship between the victim and the suspects? Was this domestic? Financial? Romantic? Delusional?
Why a father and son? Acting together? Separately? One covering for the other?
These are not prurient details. They are the basic scaffolding of a serious news report.
Instead, readers are offered a sequence of official-sounding declarations: jealousy identified, arrests made, case “solved,” investigations ongoing. The paradox is almost comic — solved, yet still under investigation. Schrödinger’s murder case.
This style of reporting treats police statements as narrative conclusions rather than starting points for inquiry.
Once an authority figure speaks, the story freezes. No context, no probing, no attempt to explain how investigators leapt from a rubbish bag containing a severed arm to an emotional motive usually associated with lovers, not septuagenarians and their sons.
One suspects the real motive for such reporting is not clarity, but caution. Better to print what is officially said than to ask uncomfortable questions.
Better to sound definitive than to admit uncertainty. Better to publish quickly than to publish meaningfully.
But journalism is not stenography.
When media reports merely echo police claims without interrogating them, the public is left with headlines that shock but do not inform.
Fear without understanding. Sensation without sense. The reader knows that something horrible happened, but learns nothing about why, how, or what it means for public safety, social patterns, or institutional accountability.
Even the human dimension is lost. The victim becomes a nameless body part. The suspects become ages and familial labels. No backgrounds, no social context, no attempt — within ethical limits — to help society understand how such violence emerges.
Good crime reporting does not sensationalise. But neither does it anesthetise.
If the motive is truly jealousy, explain it. If details cannot be revealed, say so plainly. If investigations are ongoing, do not declare closure. And if the relationship between victim and suspects is central —as it almost certainly is — then its omission is not restraint; it is failure.
The tragedy here is not only the crime itself, but the way it is laundered into a neat, meaningless paragraph.
In the end, the public is left knowing everything except the one thing journalism is meant to provide: understanding.
And that, frankly, is a far more disturbing standard than any crime report should be allowed to get away with.
The views expressed here are entirely those of the writer.
WE