Drawing upon a transnational study addressing the implication of social media sources on the daily routines of global and local mainstream journalists based in Malaysia, this conceptual paper explores the relevance of Malaysia as a site for global media research, and proposes a non-critical, non-status quo research agenda for Malaysian media research. Situated within the chasm between these two oppositional approaches, is a gap in Malaysia-based media scholarship, wherein there is a lack of ‘objective’ (value-free, interest-free scholarship that is not aligned to either state-centric nor opposition political ideologies), that simultaneously promotes ‘subjective’ phenomenological interpretative inquiry.