ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author presents a case study that shows how persistent and long-term investigative journalism, using new media, can expose the corrupt in political power and also how the very rich have harnessed the same tools to retaliate through online intimidation and disinformation. Meeting up with local journalists and scientists, the author concludes that poor governance was responsible, driven by state-level, political corruption, abetted by the federal Malaysian government. The local ruling family of then-Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud (now governor) had been in power since the 70s and had taken the opportunity to appropriate all the profit for themselves and a handful of political cronies working hand in glove with the ‘big six’ timber conglomerates, an inter-related web of family concerns based in the Chinese seaboard communities in the towns of Sibu and Miri.
