Whose Story Gets Told? How Malaysian Media Covered the East Coast Rail Link
Examining how pro-establishment media covered the ECRL project compared to independent media, as analysed by ChatGPT and Gemini.
By Alex Woon
Last Updated 25 november 2025
A rendering of CRJ-200, the train model for the up and coming East Coast Rail Link (ECRL) in Malaysia. – Farishnakwaffle, WikiCommons CC0.
During his annual budget speech in parliament in October 2025, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim highlighted the near completion of the 665km East Coast Rail Link (ECRL), which would connect the opposite coasts of Peninsular Malaysia.
The project is part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and a landmark for bilateral cooperation with China. It is also hailed as a symbol of Malaysia’s progress through successive governments.
But a closer look beyond the headlines tells a different story — how domestic media has reported, or not reported, on the project’s environmental, social, and governance impact.
Data tells the story
Over the past year, The Fourth analysed 660 news articles on the ECRL, published between April 2019 and February 2025 by four major Malaysian English-language outlets — two that are traditionally pro-establishment, and two that are considered independent.
Two artificial intelligence (AI) services, ChatGPT and Gemini, were used to categorise the articles’ sources into two main groups:
- Official sources – government officials, corporate representatives, project proponents, etc.;
- Non-official sources – local communities, NGOs, environmental groups, academics, independent policy experts, and the news outlets’ own analysis and investigations.
According to our analysis, over 88% of articles by the pro-establishment outlets contained only official sources, which means only 12% of their articles featured voices of local communities, NGOs, and independent experts. In contrast, at least 33% of articles by the independent outlets included non-official sources.
We also configured ChatGPT and Gemini to analyse if the articles were considered “Pro-Establishment”, meaning it prioritised official sources over non-official sources. The AI tools classified 91% of articles by the pro-establishment outlets as “Pro-Establishment”, compared to 77% among the independent outlets.
Breaking it down further, only 10% of the sources quoted by the pro-establishment outlets were non-official sources. The independent outlets had more than double that amount, with 24%.
Same floods, different stories
The main issue raised by non-official quarters is the environmental impact of the ECRL. In Gombak, for example, residents have reported flooding ever since construction began.
One independent outlet interviewed residents affected by the floods, while the other outlet covered indigenous people’s opposition to the project over concerns that the construction and floods were destroying their ancestral land.
In comparison, non-official voices did not appear to be featured by either of the pro-establishment outlets. We used Google advanced search operators and found no articles where the outlets conducted interviews with residents on flood woes.
One of the pro-establishment outlets reported on the compensation paid to residents for flood damage in Selangor, but only the chief minister of the state, an official figure, was interviewed in that article. No resident was interviewed.
Similarly, the other pro-establishment outlet highlighted authorities’ response to flooding concerns solely through the chief minister’s remarks. We could not find on-the-ground reporting with affected residents on its news portal.
Missing human and environmental voices
When examining the 660 articles for keywords such as “environment”, we found that the pro-establishment outlets overwhelmingly addressed these topics through the perspectives of official sources instead of affected communities.
For example, when allegations surfaced that a forest reserve in the Selangor state was de-gazetted and cleared, all four news outlets examined had reported on the official response by the ECRL project owner Malaysia Rail Link (MRL) denying its involvement in any forest reserve degazettement.
Both pro-establishment outlets gave a single sentence context in their reports that MRL was responding to “recent claims by a non-governmental organisation (NGO)” that land clearing in the state park was taking place, with no mention of who the NGO is or further elaboration.
The two independent outlets added deeper background on the initial allegations made by the environmental group Rimba Disclosure Project (currently known as RimbaWatch) which suggest through its satellite imagery that forest clearing was taking place in the Selangor State Park. The two outlets also had other reports on the group’s findings and perspectives on the issue.
A positive outcome
Initially in 2021, the Selangor government decided to de-gazette part of the Kuala Langat Forest Reserve for a development that included the ECRL project.
Both pro-establishment outlets covered the degazettement decision extensively, featuring non-official voices. Their coverage, however, made no explicit mentions of ECRL.
The independent outlets went a step further, scrutinising the corporate bodies behind ECRL while also giving space to civil society opposing the degazettement, opposition leaders urging government to pay attention to resident concerns, and an artist advocating for opposition to the degazettement.
After outlets across the board reported on the public uproar, albeit with those in pro-establishment outlets leaving out mentions of ECRL, the state government eventually reversed its decision, re-gazetted the forest reserve, and found an alternative route for the ECRL project.
Limitations and Data Disclaimer
The categorisations of speakers were done with two AI services: OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Based on human verification of a sample of their results, we estimated the accuracy to be at 70% and 74% respectively.
Our dataset comprises articles published between April 2019 and February 2025, the reason being the ECRL project was suspended by the Pakatan Harapan administration in 2018, and revived on 12 April 2019 with a lower cost. We used articles after that date to account for the change in political stance on the issue. From that point onward, establishment voices have consistently spoken in favour of the project in spite of changes in government.
The data was scraped from the online portals of the news outlets. While comprehensive, it does not include video content or articles where headlines do not feature the word “ECRL”.
Our analysis is limited to English media, and does not include vernacular media such as Chinese, Malay, or Tamil media.
“Voice attribution” (whether a source was official or non-official) was determined using a combination of AI-assisted entity recognition as well as manual review, which may feature minor classification errors.
The Big Picture: Media, Power, and Pressure
The ECRL’s media coverage is a tip of an iceberg and should not be viewed in isolation.
The coverage reflects a wider pattern in Malaysian media, one navigating pressures from political influence, media ownership, and increasingly, even intimidation from the Chinese embassy, according to one report monitoring China’s influence in Malaysian media.
China has been Malaysia’s largest trading partner since 2009, and invested RM143 billion in Malaysia during 2014, the same year when ECRL, Melaka Gateway, Bandar Malaysia, and other Chinese-backed projects were announced.
Today, it is still one of the largest investors of Malaysia, ranking third after the United States and Germany in 2024 according to a Ministry of Investment, Trade and Industry report.
China’s state-linked enterprises are not just deeply embedded in the nation’s infrastructure landscape, but also in other sectors like the digital industry, such as the new 5G infrastructure rollout.
Malaysia also has a long history of media ownership concentrated under politically connected conglomerates. This may contribute to limited spaces for dissenting narratives from non-establishment voices.
The result is an environment where public-interest journalism struggles to thrive, one where voices from diverse perspectives struggle to be heard over the noise of these megaprojects.
This article is written by Alex Woon, co-edited by Ian Yee and Sarah Yeo. Additional contribution from Nicholas Yap and Satpal Kaler .
Produced with the support from Internews.
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