Picture of Christ by Tamil Newspapers causes uproar

A Malaysian Tamil newspaper have published a photo of Jesus Christ holding a cigeratte and a can of beer in one hand, causing a stir and displeased among the Christian and the citizens. As a result, Makkal Osai was banned due to publishing such an unethical picture with the text "If a person repents his mistakes, heaven awaits him." Such act has caused a call for the ban of Makkal Osai, which was granted. However, The Malaysian Consultative Council of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism and Sikhism, however, expressed regret over the one-month suspension.

According to Walsh (2006), text and pictures carries different meanings for different readers. Although Makkal Osai meant well by posting the text that says otherwise compared to the picture, however, this has also gone against the ethical and cultural respect towards others.

Gillespie & Toynbee (2006), communication is making something common. However, Makkal Osai wanted to communicate with its readers by telling them as long as they repent, they will be forgiven by God. But by putting up an explicit picture if Jesus Christi with cigarette and beer sends out a different meaning to its readers, causing insult and upsetting the Christians.

Images have different meanings and different people with different interpretations (Lester 2003,Kress & Luuewen 2001). Makkal Osai made a huge mistake by not filtering and reading the picture, analayzing it in detail whether the ambiguous meaning of it will cause any offence.

Therefore, with the banned and later it was lifted, they have learnt their lessons that ethical issues can never be taken lightly.

(260 words)

Reference

1. Gillespie M & Toynbee J 2006,Analysing Media Texts, McGraw Hill Education, United States of America

2. Lester, P.M 2003, Visual Communication: Images with Messages, Third Edition, Wadsworth, United States of America.

3. Kress G. & Leeuwen T.V 2001, Multimodal Discourse, Arnold, United States of America.

4. Walsh M. 2006, The Textual Shift: Examining the reading process with print,visual and multimodal texts, Vol.29,No1,pp.24-37.