Chapter 8 - Movement Control Orders or “Making Confusing Orders”? Discourses of Confusion about Lockdowns in a Malaysian News Portal

Summary

Abstract

Focusing on uses of the word “confusion” and its close cognates, this chapter adopts a Critical Discourse Analysis framework to examine stances behind references to COVID-19 lockdowns and other containment measures in reports and reader comments in the online news portal Malaysiakini. Although the language of confusion often conveys general feelings of disruption and disorientation in response to the health crisis and its administrative consequences, it also frequently encompasses criticism of the content, communication, or implementation of these measures, especially in opinion pieces or reader comments. While government policies inevitably attract censure in times of uncertainty, the authors argue that discourses of confusion are also employed to express frustration with a political crisis predating the health crisis itself.

Keywords: confusion, control orders, discourse analysis, health crisis, political critique

Motivation and Aims

As elsewhere, the lives of residents of Malaysia since early 2020 have been disrupted not only by the spread of COVID-19 itself but also by the regulations, restrictions and instructions which came with it. Malaysia's initial COVID-19 containment measures, gazetted in March 2020 as Perintah Kawalan Pergerakan (PKP) in Malay and the Movement Control Order (MCO) in English, closed non-essential businesses, restricted domestic movement, and suspended international travel. They also provided the basis for more targeted measures to deal with changing circumstances in different areas, including Continued Movement Control Orders (CMCOs) to prolong restrictions, Recovery Movement Control Orders (RMCOs) to ease them, and Enhanced Control Orders (EMCOs) to tighten them around high-infection clusters. The application of these measures to the complex details of everyday life has been a constant topic of media debate, much of it addressing the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) issued periodically to explain compliance.

In the second quarter of 2021, Malaysia began to slide down the Covid Resilience rankings as other countries rolled out enough vaccinations to control infections and ease restrictions (Hong, Chang, and Varley, 2021), and while there were few anti-lockdown protests, lockdowns have faced.no shortage of criticism in the media. Some Malaysians view the control orders as repressive, others feel they do not go far enough, and many describe them as confusing.