Ads is Not Only Read by You

The majority of Malaysian Muslim citizens shocked with a feature on Star Newspaper edition 10 August 2011. As reported in an article titled, Home Ministry reprimands The Star over supplement, Home Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Tun Hussein admonished the column ‘Dining Out’ where The Star inserted an advertisement of pork cuisine in 2011 Ramadan Fasting season. The Star executive director and group chief editor Datuk Seri Wong Chun Wai has met numbers of executives to clarify the error and sincerely apologize after the editorial mistake to Malaysian Muslim practitioners. As a precaution, He claims to suspend the supplement editor in charge for the article.

Experts advised that texts which are served simultaneously with figures and pictures have to complement each other, meaning the image assists the message deliverance by functions as an illustration (Kress & Van Luween, 2006; Reep, 2006). Visual figures aid readers to capture the main idea of the words and also to attract their attentions to the prime article (Reep, 2006). Advertising system which is a form of multimodal text (Walsh, 2006) indeed has to be carefully composed, consider its relation to the audience’s perspective.  The act of interpretation of one picture is based on knowledge, behaviour and values of the readers, which is variable depends on their society (Schriver, 1997; Walsh, 2006). A portrait of pork dishes in Ramadan period might be perceived normal for Christian or Buddhist readers, but it is considered rude for Islamic citizen, for their sacred belief of pork as abstinence meal.

I personally agree with the publication ethical system where an advertisement construction has to be adjusted to meet society’s cultural context. Since religious aspect influences most of the grounding value on one particular community, it is closely linked to their daily manner and also buying habit (Milenkovic, 2009). As a newspaper editor in Malaysia, where Muslim is a dominant religion, I believe we have to respect their fundamental norm by producing a non-offensive advertisement or features. Thorough content checking is also recommended to prevent such incident to be occurred in the future.  

References

Kress, G & Van Leeuwen, T 2006, Reading images: the grammar of visual design, 2nd edn, Routledge, New York, USA.

Milenkovic, Mirjana 2009, Global Advertising in Cultural Context, Diplomica Verlag Gmbh, Hamburg.

Reep, D. 2006, ‘Document Design’ in Technical Writing, 6^th Edn, Pearson/Longman, New York, pp. 133-172.

Schriver, KA 1997, Dynamics in document design, John Wiley & Sons, New York, USA

The Star 2011, ‘Home Ministry reprimands The Star over supplement​’, The Star Online, viewed 10 June 2012, < http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2011/8/16/nation/20110816224605&sec=nation>.

Walsh, M 2006, ‘Textual shift’ in Examining the Reading Process with Print, Visual and Multimodal Texts, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, vol. 29, no.1, p. 24-37.