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April 30th, 2008
A survey of internet users aims to find out perceptions of socio-political blog credibility in Singapore. The survey, comprising 19 questions and taking just 10 minutes to complete, is available here. Respondents may win $200 cash for their participation.
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April 22nd, 2008
It is clear that the press in Singapore has limited powers. But why should that stop Singapore journalists from practising meaningful journalism? Journalists must be at the forefront of asking critical questions. Instead of documenting events and explaining policies, ignite readers’ interest in them. Build a community and balance scepticism with hope that everyone can contribute to our society. Only then would Singapore journalism truly live up to its tag a “nation-building partner”.
– Loh Chee Kong won Mediacorp’s Young Journalist of the Year award. His full article is available here.
April 21st, 2008
A group of bloggers has sent a 20-page proposal to the Minister for Information, Communication and the Arts, Dr Lee Boon Yang. The paper, titled “Proposals for Internet freedom in Singapore”, expresses the bloggers’ concerns about Internet regulation in Singapore and offers proposals for the government to consider in its current review of such regulations. The review was led by Choo Zheng Xi of The Online Citizen and Alex Au of Yawning Bread, and included the editor of Journalism.sg.
Bloggers elaborate on their ideas:
Bernard Leong on community moderation.
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April 12th, 2008
Extract from Prime Minister Lee’s speech at the LSE Asia Forum, 11 April 2008.
The theme of this conference – knowledge – engages many of us in Asia. The whole continent is on the move today, because China and India have taken off. But Asian countries know that to sustain their growth and improve their people’s lives, the use and creation of knowledge are crucial. Hence many countries are seeking to educate their people, upgrade their economies, and create conditions for knowledge and innovation to flourish.
Today Asia continues to lag behind the West in the level of science, engineering, technology, all key fields of knowledge for economic development and human progress. But this is changing with schools, colleges, universities and research institutes sprouting across China and at a more measured pace also in India.
However, what the universities in China and India have not yet succeeded in doing is to create the environment of open inquiry and experimentation, conducive to, and indeed essential for, cutting-edge research and major breakthroughs. The intellectual ferment and exchange required to challenge great minds to do great things is not yet there. They are also weighed down by the legacy of academic hierarchies based on seniority rather than talent, unlike the best American universities. This is changing, but it will take time. Meanwhile we already see more researchers from Chinese and Indian institutions publishing papers in leading international academic journals.
Singapore’s Approach
As a small country with no natural resources, Singapore has long known that we have no choice but to make the mastery of knowledge our competitive advantage. We have been implicitly building a knowledge economy, long before this became a buzzword. From the late 70s, we realised we could not differentiate ourselves from our competitors or raise our standards of living by competing on cost alone. Hence we pursued several strategies to build up this knowledge edge.
First, we have invested heavily in our people through education. […]
Second, we have encouraged the free flow of information. This is the way to keep ourselves fully abreast of new developments and ideas, and to be ready to react promptly to a changing world. Singapore is fully plugged into the world, and wide open to the cross-currents of global interactions. Because English has been our working language, it gave us a tremendous advantage in the internet age. As an air and sea hub, we are linked up physically to the rest of the world, and as a telecommunications hub we are fully hooked up, whether wired or wireless, whether through the internet or cable TV. We still need to filter the flow of information, to maintain basic standards of decency, and preserve racial and religious harmony, but it is confined to a very minimum. All this is essential to nurture knowledge industries, whether it is financial services, interactive and digital media, or just-in-time manufacturing.
Third, we are stepping up our R&D efforts, from basic R&D to translational research to development work close to the end products and markets. […]
Fourth, the whole tenor of our society is geared towards welcoming new ideas, and adapting to change. Our ethos is cosmopolitan and pragmatic. Our society is meritocratic and egalitarian – everyone has a chance to learn and excel. We strive to operate rationally and flexibly, and to keep our sense of identity as an Asian society without being constrained by rigid social hierarchy or stifling political correctness. We respect the rule of law and intellectual property rights. We reward effort and work, encourage risk-taking, and embrace diversity.
Challenges Ahead
To stay competitive on the global stage, Asian countries have to keep on moving in this direction of knowledge, scientific excellence and innovation. But it will not always be a smooth journey. There will be difficulties to overcome along the way. Let me highlight three broad challenges.
The first challenge is to ensure that everyone in a society benefits from the knowledge economy. Overall the knowledge economy will be a boon for mankind, but individual workers will need the skills to do things which the computers and robotic tools cannot do.
Another challenge is the complete and instant exposure to an overwhelming torrent of information through the internet and online channels. This brings great economic benefits, and great potential for sharing and using knowledge, but it also causes people to respond to unfiltered, raw information or misinformation without the benefit of reflection time or informed interpretation. Furthermore, instant communication is not just about conveying information. Inflammatory opinions, half-truths and untruths will also gain currency through viral distribution. The online film “Fitna” which has offended Muslims worldwide is just the latest example of wrong-headedness, asserting the right to freedom of expression in democratic Holland while overlooking the costs, namely the stoking of hatred between devout Muslims and Christians. Terrorist groups are using the internet too, to find recruits, spread their extremist ideologies, and prepare attacks.
With satellite TV and the internet, events are also magnified across a global listening board. The world is now their stage. We see this in the protests that have erupted during the Olympic torch relay. The Olympics is China’s coming out party, to celebrate its progress and opening up to the world. They sent the Olympic torch overseas in what is described as a “journey of harmony”. But not surprisingly, China’s opponents see this as a golden opportunity to make their point. So as the torch travels the world, it has faced challenges at virtually every stop so far. Vivid TV images of demonstrators waving banners, scuffling with police, and making concerted assaults to snuff out the flame are beamed live around the world, achieving an asymmetrical prominence, and so influencing public opinion against China and the Games.
No protesting group truly expects that their public display of anger and outrage at China’s treatment of Tibetans or ethnic Han dissidents will change China’s policy when it affects its core security concerns. They know no government can give ground on any core issue under such public duress, whatever the merits of the arguments. So whatever the intentions of the demonstrators, the people of China believe they want to inflict maximum humiliation on China and the Chinese people more than the Chinese government. The outrage in China, especially among the young, can be read on the flooded internet bulletin boards, all carrying virulent anti-foreign sentiments. Pity they are in unintelligible Chinese ideographs. Were they in the English language, young Americans and Europeans would realise that these displays of contempt for China and things Chinese will have consequences in their lifetime, well beyond the Olympic Games.
In this new environment of raw, unprocessed information with instant worldwide impact, it will not be easy to keep the public debate on a high plane, especially on controversial issues where emotions rather than reason prevail. This will change the texture of societies everywhere. Societies will have to adapt and evolve defensive mechanisms and habits to thrive in these new circumstances. Amidst unceasing and bewildering changes, we will all the more need strong moral and social values that help us keep our bearings and hold our societies together.
Finally, fostering a sense of national identity will be a major challenge, especially for small and open societies like Singapore. Globalisation and the knowledge economy have created a single worldwide market for talent. In every field, the most able people are in demand worldwide, and are also highly mobile. The best musicians and sportspersons are already a global breed. But to do well, a country needs a core of its ablest citizens, those with both the intellectual and social acumen, to play leadership roles in the economy, the administration, and the political leadership. Without that central core to take the country forward, the society cannot perform to its full potential, and the citizens will suffer.
Conclusion
Despite these challenges, Asia’s transformation will continue. It will be powered by knowledge and ideas, and by billions of increasingly-skilled workers and entrepreneurs continually searching for new and better ways of doing things. The politics in Asian countries will inevitably change too. The outcome will not be determined by pressure from outside, but by the internal processes in these countries, which are old societies with deep cultures and long histories.
Not all Asian countries will effortlessly adapt to this new environment. But all will make the effort, several will excel, and many will eventually make the grade. Singapore will try its best to be among those who will succeed.
April 11th, 2008
Malaysiakini editor in chief Steven Gan has credited his independent news website’s success to old style journalistic values. “We are new media but we practise old media rules,” he said at a talk organised by NTU’s Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information yesterday.
Launched in time for Malaysia’s 1999 general elections, it survived political and financial pressures to play a celebrated role in last month’s historic elections. It emerged as the country’s pre-eminent political news source on the web – and some would say in any medium.
Although seen as an icon of the internet revolution, Gan made clear that Malaysiakini is at its heart driven by the classic values of professional journalism. Unlike most websites, it is run by fulltime journalists. Indeed, what distinguishes it from the mainstream press is that the journalists are fully in charge. He noted that Malaysia’s newspapers are owned directly or indirectly by the ruling elite. “Journalists own and run Malaysiakini,” he said.
Gan himself comes from a mainstream press background, having worked at the Sun in KL and The Nation in Bangkok before starting Malaysiakini. His partner and CEO, Premesh Chandran, was also a newspaper journalist. While no news organisation can run away from business concerns, Gan said it makes a difference to have a CEO who understands the need to protect journalism from excessive commercial pressure.
Despite its small fulltime reporting staff of 10, Malaysiakini distinguished itself by being the first to announce the states that fell to the opposition, as well as the government’s failure to win two-thirds of the seats in parliament. Gan revealed that they were aided by 12 volunteer part-timers – mainly journalism students – who had been recruited and trained in the preceding months. These volunteers did much of the legwork on polling night, although it was left to the fulltimers to file the stories.
Malaysiakini was also aided by the failure of the mainstream media to rise to the challenge. Broadcast media, tightly controlled by the government, led with states that were secured by the ruling alliance and waited for official concessions before announcing results. Print media were not focused on updating their websites and seemed to be working towards their print deadlines.
Malaysiakini used the elections to attract more subscribers: it provided free access during the campaign period. The strategy worked. Its normal traffic of 200,000 visitors a day rose to 500,000 on election night. Many new readers became paying subscribers soon after the elections, such that the site achieved RM700,000 in subscription sales in the first quarter of this year, compared with around RM1 million for the whole of 2007.
Gan said that the impact of the internet should not be exaggerated. With a student activist background himself, he paid tribute to the opposition politicians and activists on the ground who had worked tirelessly and at great personal risk. Some were still under detention, he noted. “The issues were there, simmering and bubbling. What the internet did was bring them to a boil,” he said.
Asked if the government would crack down on internet dissent, Gan said that this was unlikely. “We have reached a tipping point, and it is very hard for the government to roll back the freedoms,” he said. Any crackdown would be met by protests, as Malaysians had grown to appreciate the value of the internet, he said.
Gan’s talk was part of a series of seminars at the Wee Kim Wee School on the Future of Journalism, which looked at issues facing mainstream press, niche media and citizen journalism.
Other speakers earlier in the semester included P N Balji, Mediacorp Press editorial director; Reginald Chua, assistant managing editor at the Wall Street Journal; Peter Lim, former editor in chief of the Straits Times group; Holman Chin, general manager of the Viscion publishing group; N W Goh, a former senior editor of Lianhe Zaobao; Stuart Koe, CEO of Fridae.com; John-Paul Tan, of the Catholic parish newspaper Tomorrow; and Choo Zheng Xi, editor of The Online Citizen.
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March 29th, 2008
Malaysia’s Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi says his government made a big mistake in the recent elections by underestimating the power of the internet. His statement has provoked a new wave of interest in the internet’s political impact – and the question of whether what happened in Malaysia could happen in Singapore. Click here for a commentary in the newspaper Today.
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March 20th, 2008
SPH Lecture, 3 March 2008, SPH Auditorium. Ngiam Tong Dow is a retired senior civil servant and an SPH director.
Friends and Colleagues
Thank you for having me to speak this afternoon. As this is an SPH family gathering, I will speak on the topic “REPORTING, THEN and NOW”. Alan’s invitation to me to address the younger generation brings back a flood of memories of a time when I was one of you. Believe it or not, I was a Straits Times cub reporter in the1950’s.
After my “O” levels at St Andrew’s School, I was recommended by my principal, Reverend Canon Adams, to Mr Leslie Hoffman, the editor-in-chief of the Straits Times, for a cub reporter’s job.
All the professional training I had to be a reporter was a correspondence course in writing English from a private distance learning school, the Regent Institute in London. The private commercial school specialised in coaching students from the Commonwealth whose mother tongue was not English to write English. My literature teacher at Serangoon English School paid the tuition fees for me. I learnt how to write standard English from the many red ink corrections of the Regent tutor on my exercise script.
Years later, another tutor, Dr Goh Keng Swee, corrected the rough drafts of his administrative cadet, namely me, in his distinctive green ink, improving them beyond recognition.
The organisation chart of the Straits Times in the 1950’s was stark and simple. The entreprenurial boss was clearly Mr AC Simmons. He was the proprietor and publisher. He could hire and fire the editor-in-chief, Mr Leslie Hoffman, who in turn could hire and fire anyone of us mere reporters. All that was required to be a reporter was a pass in “O” level English, an ability to type, and speed in shorthand. The only trouble was that there were hundreds of “O” levels like myself.
You may consider yourself a Norman Mailer, but you can never ever throw a tantrum. If you lose your cool, there will be another eager beaver rushing in to take your place on the news desk. The cub reporter’s salary was $250, with another $75 as transport allowance. If there is a breaking story, you get there pronto: walk, run or swim. You do not wait for office transport. You miss a scoop at your own peril.
As you know, I am Chairman of the Board’s Remuneration Committee. The ground rules have certainly changed. HR drums into me that unless we pay competitive salaries, our star writers will leave us for the competition. The early Straits Times I grew up in had star reporters without having to pay superlative salaries. When Francis Wong reports a crime story, you could hear the heavy footsteps of the policeman walking down the street. When Geoffrey Abishegenaden reports a Malaysia Cup final, you can hear the roar of the crowd piercing the sky over Jalan Besar stadium. They are masters at creating atmosphere.
To my generation of Singaporeans, Jalan Besar stadium is the original home of Singapore football. How many of us will recall the great football of Awang Bakar, Chia Boon Leong, Abdul Rahman, Choo Seng Quee, Quah Kim Song, and an even earlier great Dolfattah, played at Jalan Besar?
Soft focus reporting is the forte of our news editor Sit Yin Fong. With impeccable taste, he selects the delectable pin-up models for the center-fold of the Weekender, which makes the day for us young bloods.
Reporting is both a skill and an art. Reporting to Mr Hoffman the first morning, he told me that he was employing me as a reporter, not as a journalist. As a reporter, I was only to report the what, when, where, and how of events or situations. The sine qua non of reporting is to get your facts right and your quotes complete. It is not as easy as it sounds.
In the days before the tape-recorder and the TV camera, being accurate and timely is hard work. Speed in writing shorthand is de rigueur. Accuracy is best tested in parliamentary reporting. Chia Poteik is our best parliamentary reporter. He is our anchor in the courts, reporting all sensational murder and complex commercial litigation cases without missing a beat. His speed in writing shorthand is legendary. I cannot recall any occasion when he was faulted for an inaccurate quote.
I spent quite a bit of time as a cub reporter in the subordinate courts in South Bridge Road. One morning, Justice Choor Singh, who was then a district judge, threatened to cite me for contempt of court for a report I had filed the previous day, which he considered inaccurate. His stern warning is forever seared in my memory. As a result, I have also come to have zero tolerance for inaccurate and slipshod work by my subordinates.
At the risk of offending some of best friends in journalism, opinion pieces in my opinion are not quite journalism. I prefer straight reporting. Joseph Yeo and Peter D’Cruz, who cover the union and general beats, excelled in straight reporting.
Straight reporting allows the facts to stand on their own. Straight reporting allows the story to tell its tale. There is no attempt by the sub-editor to juxtapose words and pictures to create misleading impressions. The straight reporter does not crusade. He has no personal agenda.
The ogre in our nightmares is said to be the imperial censor. Yet are we being honest with ourselves? You may hang and quarter me for saying this. If we look deep into our hearts, we may find that our enemy is within us. Our ego may be our greatest stumbling block.
As human beings, we all have our own convictions – religious, political or moral. If we allow our own beliefs to creep into our journalism, we should not be surprised if our neighbours and, indeed, the state respond and challenge us frontally.
I am not suggesting that as citizens and journalists we should be simply unquestioning, uncritical, sycophantic admirers of the state and the power it wields. If you feel irked by MICA’s guidelines, then let me tell you of the unremitting routine of North Korean diplomats.
In the 1960’s, out of diplomatic courtesy, I had to receive them when they called to hand over trade literature. Every presentation began with a litany of praise for their Great Leader. The senior diplomat would read out word for word the preamble while the other would record what he declaimed. The script had to be followed to the letter. It was an Orwellian nightmare for me, and I suspect for them too.
Yet on reflection, I wondered how different were the North Koreans from the Spanish Inquisitors. Indeed, how different were they from the millions of Chinese who had to drop everything they were doing at noon to listen to the Songs of Praise for Chairman Mao, blaring from loudspeakers all over China.
Minister Mentor once told me that to govern, you must have your hands on three levers of power, namely the Treasury, the Army and the Voice. If you manage the economy well, the Treasury would be full and abundant. If you train the Army well, you need not fear your foes. If you want to win the hearts and minds of the people, you need to have a free press.
Unlike western-educated liberals, to me a free press is not a tower of Babel. In extremis, censorship is necessary. While newspapers can report the number of people killed in racial riots, it will be totally irresponsible for the media to break down fatalities by race in the highly charged emotional tensions of the first days. Fatality figures by race can be released later when the police and armed forces have regained control.
The power to censor has to be used wisely and sparingly. History records that the death of Qin Shi Huang on one of his trips to Eastern China was kept away from his troops until the imperial war carriage arrived back in Xianyang, the capital, now known as Xian. A premature leak of his death would have demoralised his troops and aided his enemies.
On the other hand, a complete news blackout imposed on the Tangshan earthquake, which killed a million people in 1976 just before the death of Chairman Mao, did untold damage to the credibility of the Chinese Government. It was a bad, if not futile, exercise of censorship. In fact, with the advent of the internet, and phone cameras, censorship is almost impossible.
As reporters, our craft is writing. We are wordsmiths. To keep in top form, the writer has to exercise his vocabulary and command of language in the same way as a single handicapper in golf hits 200 balls on the practice range everyday. Dr Goh taught me how to exercise my vocabulary. He told me to pick a word, any word, and write out its five synonyms. Turn it over, and write out its five antonyms. Start with hot and cold.
Skill in writing does not make you a good writer per se. You need knowledge and content. You have to research the facts and the background of topics before you set out to write a political, scientific, economic, or even simply a human-interest story. For instance, the straight reporting and the reflective articles on the passing away of President Suharto in the Wall Street Journal and the IHT make for more compelling reading than our own. To improve, I suggest we benchmark ourselves against what we consider to be good writing in the pages of our competitors.
The role, value add, of the journalist is to make a complex subject or a profound topic simple to grasp. If the average reader with an ‘O’ level cannot fully understand what you want to say to him, it is your failure, not his ignorance. I asked many of my more erudite friends in finance and economics to explain what exactly are carbon credits. I am afraid I have yet to receive a crystal clear exposition of carbon credits in the literature on climate control.
In my more sceptical moments, I even wonder whether highly paid risk managers in banking ever really understood what are derivatives, collatorised debt instruments, and subprime loans. To end, I like to quote one of my mentors who said that if you do not think straight, you cannot write straight. If you yourself cannot understand a topic well, how can you have the temerity to write an opinion piece on it?
If I sound overly critical, it is because I believe passionately in the sacred mission of the press, which is to uphold truth, and protect the integrity of our nation in clear, simple, inspiring writing. Our role is to read the verdict of the people correctly, so that the Government can continue to retain the mandate of heaven to rule.
Thank you
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March 10th, 2008
Long characterised as authoritarian in popular culture, the Singaporean political context is actually far from straightforward. State-led industrial policy in favour of high-tech economic activities has created some opportunities for social change. At the same time, conflicts within society itself have limited any sudden moves towards a more liberal politics. Many of these pre-existing conflicts have spilled over onto the minimally-regulated realms of the Internet, which in turn has accentuated the multi-dimensional nature of social struggle in Singapore. These developments have overshadowed the Internet’s ability to unite previously marginalised individuals across geographies.
Such a situation is likely to pose little threat to the continuation of state-led development in Singapore, even as the state continues to offer a wider variety of channels through which social dissent can be articulated. The Internet’s ‘information revolution’ has clearly opened up new public spaces for social action, which will no doubt continue to be utilised heavily in the years to come. But as long as Singapore’s economy continues to remain healthy, and the personal political inclinations of state and ruling party leaders do not overly veer from established ‘pragmatic’ norms, we should expect change resulting from social activism–internet-based or otherwise–to remain incremental at best.
Read the full paper here.
by
March 2nd, 2008
The following commentary has been widely quoted – and misquoted. For those who lack the patience to read it closely – including, sadly, the international news agency Reuters – here is a summary of its key points. (1) The issue is not whether the national media answered key questions (it cannot force answers out of government, as Reuters itself discovered, although it buried this pertinent fact low down in its report), nor whether reporters pressed the government for answers (we can take it for granted that they did). The issue is instead why the national media’s initial published reports did not even mention the key questions of public interest. (2) Since there is a standard journalistic way of handling instances when important questions are not answered by newsmakers, the media’s failure to do so for such a big story can only be explained by political pressure, not by some lapse in professional judgment. (3) Political interference of this sort is extremely damaging to media credibility.
Anyone receiving the news last week that a dangerous JI detainee had escaped from custody would have had an immediate question: How in the world did he escape?
The question is so natural and so obvious that you’d think anyone barely paying attention would ask it. Unless, apparently, one worked for the national news media – in which case the question of how Mas Selamat Kastari escaped was immaterial.
At least, that’s how it seemed right up to Thursday morning last week. Channel News Asia did not raise the question in its online report, posted a few hours after the escape. The Straits Times went to town with the story the next morning, carrying dramatic details of the ongoing manhunt in a page one story deemed worthy of five bylines, with the news editor himself leading the charge. But, apparently, none of them considered the “how” question to be newsworthy.
ST’s competitor Today had a strikingly similar approach on day one, covering the story as if it was the National Day Parade: a big show, not requiring the activation of any grey cells. Today brands itself on reporting the meaning behind the news, because it believes that the mere facts of the news are commodities already circulating through electronic media. Today’s attempt to show that it had something more current and value-added than ST – whose headline read, “Massive manhunt” – was the headline “Manhunt continues”. Like ST, Today’s page one story, appearing next to its slogan “we set you thinking”, neglected to ask – let alone answer – how Mas Selamat escaped.
Thus, following the mainstream media over the first 24 hours was frustrating and farcical. Not because the public must get answers instantly – I don’t believe that government or anyone else must serve the 24-hour news cycle at the expense of more urgent tasks – but because people deserve to know that questions of public interest are taken seriously by the journalists who serve them. Journalists can’t always find the answers, but they can at least anticipate readers’ questions.
You already know this instinctively if you are a professional journalist. There’s a standard way of handling unavoidable gaps in your story, such as when newsmakers are not ready to answer questions by press time: you simply raise the question in your story, and state that answers are not yet forthcoming.
This is exactly what other media did in its initial reports. The Associated Press news agency quoted the brief Ministry of Home Affairs statement about in the third paragraph of its report, adding immediately after, “It did not say how he escaped.”
Similarly, Canada’s CBC said in the third paragraph of its report, “The statement did not say how he escaped.” The International Herald Tribune said, “Singapore has one of the tightest security systems in the world, and the government gave no details on how he escaped.”
In Singapore, in the first 24 hours following the escape, it was left to the bizarre combination of independent bloggers and PAP MPs to ask the question that was on everyone’s mind. Singapore’s mainstream media acted as if they didn’t want to know. Only on day two of the coverage, after the obvious questions had surfaced in Parliament and blogs, did the media air them. In ST’s case, an article at the bottom of an inside page reported public incredulity at the news. Today’s single story the same day uncharacteristically led with a human interest angle – a father afraid for his school-going child’s safety – and buried the tough questions.
When the national news media are so uniformly guilty of a lapse that puts them so clearly out of sync with other opinion shapers – in this case, the foreign media, local bloggers and even PAP backbenchers – there can be only one logical explanation: media management by the government. Editors must have been instructed not to raise the “how” question publicly.
Muffling the media in this way may not have much of an effect on the outcome of this particular case. The relevant questions will surface anyway, as they already have. Home Affairs Minister Wong Kan Seng has already promised an independent inquiry. Foreign Minister George Yeo has assured that “what can be made public, will be made public”.
If other fiascos – ranging from the Nicoll Highway disaster to the NKF affair and SAF training mishaps – are any guide to how this one will play out, citizens will eventually get pretty detailed answers, and can then assess for themselves whether there’s been enough accountability, transparency and learning on the part of government.
So, the main impact of the national media’s failure will be felt by the media themselves. Every time officials use their political power to force the press to act in a way that’s plainly counter to public expectations, it will lose credibility – the resource that even ministers acknowledge is something the media cannot do without. And this at a time of proliferating choice, when the only sensible policy option is to invest in the credibility of the nation’s mainstream media, as I’ve tried to argue elsewhere.
Unfortunately, the die appears to have been cast: political control of the national press will be used to ensure that the tough questions about the great escape story are asked ever so gently, if at all. Journalists will instead give us blanket coverage of the manhunt, showing the impressive Singapore law and order system in action.
On Sunday, day four of ST’s coverage, the national paper decided at last that it might be time to point fingers. Its editorial – unfortunately not the best read part of the paper – suggested that “complacency” may have set in. Opining that “the systems designed are solid”, the editorial added, “But are security chiefs satisfied that rank and file personnel are discharging their duties with matching thoroughness?”
In the same day’s edition, news editor Carl Skadian finally acknowledged, “To most people, the questions uppermost in their minds were ‘how did he do it?’ and ‘how could something like this happen in Singapore?’” Not that this made a jot of difference to ST’s coverage. This statement was buried in the 4th leg of an article on the last of six pages of a package otherwise devoted to such minutiae as the use of MMS to spread the Wanted man’s picture and how Mas Selamat got his limp.
Treating citizens as if they were brain-dead will not make them so; they will simply migrate to other media that take them more seriously.
Postscript
On day five of its coverage, Today finally runs a hard-hitting (by mainstream media standards) column by its chief P N Balji, criticising the government for its bunker mentality in releasing information.
February 9th, 2008
To generate discussion on the unique ethical issues that confront journalism in Asia, the Center for Media Freedom and Responsibility (CMFR) and the Asia Media Forum (AMF) launched a blog site on journalism ethics last Jan. 30.
The site, Eye on the Asian Media: Asia Media Forum (http://www.eyeonethics.org), will feature stories and analyses on ethical issues facing journalism in Asia—a region in turmoil and change as well as stability and progress. Readers may comment on the articles as well as contribute to encourage dialogue. The site also contains various journalism codes of ethics across the continent and links to other media ethics resources.
Original content will be uploaded monthly in the site, which is edited by CMFR deputy director and UP journalism professor Luis V. Teodoro.
For its maiden issue, ‘The Jakarta Post’ chief editor Endy Bayuni analyses whether peace journalism could have eased the transition of East Timor to independence. Hector Bryant L. Macale, assistant editor of the CMFR’s flagship media-monitoring publication the ‘Philippine Journalism Review Reports’ (PJR Reports), focuses on the blurring of the line between news and advertising: Is it really a choice between ‘old-fashioned ethics’ and ‘rationalized profit’?
Taking a cue from the Nov. 29, 2007 siege at a hotel in Manila’s financial district, CMFR staffwriter Don Gil K. Carreon asks another timely question for journalists: Which should take precedence for journalists, the presumably lawful orders of the authorities, or the public’s right to information?
“While the ethics of journalism has evolved enough to be in many ways universal in character and application (truth-telling, for example, is among journalism’s universally accepted ethical principles),” Teodoro writes about the site. “There is at the same time a specificity to the circumstances in which they are practiced which complicate and affect the application of principles in decision-making. To what extent, for example, is trial by publicity avoidable in societies where the justice system is failing, and where only press exposure often makes the difference between wrong doers’ being brought to court or escaping prosecution?”
CMFR is a Philippine based non-profit organisation promoting press freedom and advocating professionalism and ethics among media practitioners.
AMF is a network of journalists from across Asia to share insights on issues relating to media and their profession, as well as stories, information and opinions on democracy, development and human rights in the region.
Readers are encouraged to visit the site http://www.eyeonethics.org. Comments and contributions are highly welcome.
