Category: Journalism.SG

by

CHERIAN GEORGE

September 20th, 2012

The Singapore Government’s order that Google block YouTube viewers here from watching an extreme anti-Islam video is a case of several wrongs not making a right. It also shows, yet again, why dealing with hateful speech is probably the single most fraught dilemma facing diverse societies that aspire to be open and progressive.

It’s obvious to most that Innocence of Muslims is a gratuitous attack on a religion, with no redeeming artistic, scientific or intellectual merit.

It is also clear that the film was cited as the reason for enraged mobs taking violent and deadly retribution against the culture that produced it.

While there’s little disagreement over these two separate statements, things get foggy when you try to add them up. Suddenly, one plus one seems to result in anything but two.

In Singapore, the fog has resulted in the Government – which normally prides itself in consistency – coming out with two contradictory statements in the space of five days.

On 14 September, Singapore’s security czar and deputy prime minister Teo Chee Hean said: “I am confident that Singaporeans will react to this film in the same rational and calm manner as they have done previously.”

But on 19 September, his Home Affairs Ministry said this: “The continued circulation of this film is likely to cause disharmony or feelings of ill-will between different groups in Singapore.”

In between the two statements, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong had, on 15 September, urged Singaporeans to stay calm. “It doesn’t matter what happens elsewhere in the world. … These are not our quarrels and we should continue living peacefully, harmoniously together, among ourselves and nurture and preserve our harmony.”

From a position of confidence in the resilience and good sense of Singaporeans, and despite the PM exercising timely moral leadership, the Government has now declared that the film was likely to cause (not “might cause”) ill effects.

The move could lead outsiders who don’t know the country well to conclude that Singapore is no more stable than others that saw it necessary to ban the film.

Worse, it once again puts Muslim Singaporeans on the defensive. Already tired of being stereotyped as people who lose their heads over religion, Singapore Muslims will once again feel pressured to explain that, no, there is nothing in our religion that predisposes us to violence; the scenes you see in the Middle East are really about geopolitics, political opportunism, poverty and ignorance – not religion. It is difficult to persuade others of that when the Government now says that it needed to take the “pre-emptive measure of asking MDA to make the request to Google to block online access to the film to prevent similar violent incidents from taking place here”.

Of course, many Singaporeans will feel that banning the film was the right thing to do – and express disappointment that Google did not remove it of its own volition. The majority will also probably feel that it is better to be safe than sorry.

The fact that Singapore’s neighbours banned it might have been a factor as well. If so, perhaps the Government should have invoked the “Zoolander Principle” instead of claiming that Singapore’s inter-religious harmony is too weak to withstand this provocation.

Zoolander, you may recall, was the Ben Stiller comedy that was banned here in 2002. Although the censors never explicitly said so, the move was probably an expression of solidarity with Malaysia – which had banned the film because it cast a fictitious Malaysian prime minister as a crook.

A show of solidarity with other countries concerned about gratuitous attacks on religion would have been easier to swallow than a statement that expresses doubt in Singaporeans’ ability to react in a “rational and calm” manner to hateful speech. Declaring a lack of trust in the public is hardly the way to build that trust – which is ultimately Singapore’s most powerful defence against global forces that seek to tear societies apart.

by

CHERIAN GEORGE

September 15th, 2012

In sending a man to jail for violence-ridden Facebook posts, Singapore’s High Court has drawn a line around extreme speech that is more restrictive of political expression than what is widely considered as best practice. The decision reflects Singapore’s well-established preference for public order over free expression.

In 2010, engineer Gary Yue Mun Yew posted a link to a video clip the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat while viewing a parade. “We should re-enact a live version of this on our grandstand during our national’s parade!!!!!!” he said. On his own Facebook page, he posted a classic Vietnam War photo of an execution, but with cabinet minister Wong Kan Seng’s head superimposed.

In March, Yue was fined S$8,500 by a district judge. The judge ruled that while the post contained an incitement to violence, Yue had not intended to incite violence: he had been driven by “angst” and a desire for attention.

The prosecution appealed. According to CNA, High Court Judge Quentin Loh said he could not see the distinction drawn by the lower court. Justice Loh said he found “direct and undisputed evidence” that Yue “intended to incite violence”. Yue has been sentenced to two months’ jail – a “stiff sentence” intended to deter “behaviour which has the potential to be injurious to public order and safety”.

Under international human rights law, incitement to violence is not protected by the right to freedom of expression. One of the most horrific of such cases involved the radio station that instigated and helped organise the genocide in Rwanda. Its leaders were convicted by an international tribunal – a decision welcomed by human rights defenders.

Words, in turns out, can indeed move sticks and stones to break one’s bones.

However, courts worldwide have recognised that concerns about public order and safety need to be balanced with people’s need to participate in political debate. And it is widely accepted that democratic debate must give some latitude to speech that most consider offensive or distasteful (as Yue’s postings certainly were).

To strike this balance, one group of legal experts came up with the so-called “Johannesburg Principles” (download PDF here). Among other things, the 1995 document states that if a government wants to prosecute speech as a threat to national security, it must prove that:

1. a) the expression is intended to incite imminent violence;
2. b) it is likely to incite such violence; and
3. c) there is a direct and immediate connection between the expression and the likelihood or occurrence of such violence.

Similar principles have been applied by the European Court of Human Rights. This Court has occasionally been asked to judge whether governments’ actions violate Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which protects freedom of expression. A couple of contrasting cases involving Turkey illustrate how the Court tries to strike a balance.

In one 1997 case, Zana v. Turkey, the European Court was asked to examine the Turkish authorities’ decision to imprison a former mayor for what he said in an interview. The accused had said he supported the PKK guerrilla movement; and that while he was “not in favour of massacres”, “anyone can make mistakes, and the PKK kill women and children by mistake.”

Looking at the context of the extreme tension in Southeastern Turkey at that time, the European Court decided in favour of the government. It said that the words of a former mayor of the most important city in that region, carried in a major daily newspaper, “had to be regarded as likely to exacerbate an already explosive situation”. The Turkish authorities had therefore not transgressed Article 10, the Court found.

In contrast, the European Court in Karata v. Turkey found that the authorities had violated a Kurdish poet’s free speech rights under Article 10 when the government imprisoned him. Karata’s collection of poetry included lines that called for violence in aggressive tones. However, the Court said, “the fact that they were artistic in nature and of limited impact made them less a call to an uprising than an expression of deep distress in the face of a difficult political situation”.

As such cases build up in Europe, Latin America and Africa, a pattern emerges that is consistent with the Johannesburg Principles. Jurisdictions that want to provide space for free speech while protecting public order and people’s safety will not convict individuals just because they have used expressions that, at face value, condone violence or even murder. There must be a specific intent to incite violence, and a concrete danger of violent acts being committed as a result.

Based on this principle, courts treat what politicians and other influential speakers say more seriously than unknown individuals; and also consider whether the pre-existing social context is one where listeners are likely to act on the offending words.

As Gary Yue has discovered to his cost and others should take note, Singapore applies a different standard.

Further reading

• Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, Background Paper, “Human Rights Considerations in Combating Incitement to Terrorism and Related Offences” (2006) Download PDF here.
• Council of Europe, Manual on Hate Speech by Anne Weber (2009) Download PDF here.

by

CHERIAN GEORGE

September 4th, 2012

Text of a talk delivered at the Singapore Management University law school on 3 September.

When I started writing about press freedom issues more than 25 years ago, most Singaporeans seemed to believe that independent media might actually cause more harm than good in a country that was already pretty well governed. It wasn’t that they believed that their press was free. They just didn’t care that it wasn’t.

Today, most Singaporeans seem equally unconvinced that press freedom is an important issue. However, the reasons have changed. Singaporeans no longer take good governance for granted and they are much more prepared to speak up on national issues. It’s just that they don’t feel they need the press to magnify their voices.

Today’s internet-enabled citizens feel empowered to say almost anything, whenever, however and to whomever they wish. Seized by this new sense of efficacy, many critical Singaporeans feel they have outgrown the national media. They opine that if the mainstream press is government-controlled, it can go to hell (netizens not being known for polite euphemisms).

This confidence is based on the assumption that if the main arteries feeding information and ideas to the country’s democratic heart are politically clogged, we can still rely on a free-flowing online bypass.

This confidence is misplaced. Yes, blogs and online forums add precious diversity to the media landscape in Singapore, just as alternative media do in every society. But alternative media, while necessary, are not sufficient. And mainstream media, while not sufficient, are still necessary.

Therefore, Singaporeans who care about our democratic development still need to be concerned about restrictions that handicap traditional news organisations in fulfilling their professional roles.

Restrictions

Before I explain why, let’s be clear about the extent of those restrictions. Media freedom is not absolute anywhere in the world, either in practice or in principle. So the problem is not that Singapore’s media are regulated as such, but that the manner of regulation is not in keeping with what is currently regarded as international best practice.

International human rights law has worked out certain principles for balancing rights and responsibilities. The proper balance will differ from country to country, but there are certain “out of bounds” markers that governments should not cross when they regulate freedom of speech. Courts elsewhere increasingly apply a so-called “three-part test” to judge whether a government is crossing the OB markers.

First, any restrictions should be done according to written laws – laws that are precise, clear and predictable. We are certainly not as bad as dictatorships where strongmen rule by edict and impose arbitrary, whimsical punishments. However, Singapore fails this first test by having a number of restrictions that are vaguely worded, and that are effected administratively at the discretion of officials and without judicial review. The executive can, for example, revoke or deny a publishing permit at any time and is under no legal obligation to give any reasons.

The second part of the three-part test is that any limitation on freedom of expression must be for a legitimate purpose. In international law, the only legitimate aims are to protect the rights or reputations of others, national security or public order, or public health or morals. What is absolutely rejected as a legitimate aim of censorship is to make the government’s job easier. Singapore crosses this OB marker as well – the government has been quite forthright in claiming the authority to set the national agenda and to govern decisively, even if it means restricting the press.

The third part of the test is that any restriction must be necessary and proportionate, and not engage in overkill. The proscription must match the supposed threat to society. Singapore again fails on this score. For example, the preservation of multi-racial, multi-religious peace is the most commonly cited reason why our press needs close supervision – but it has never been adequately explained why, in order to achieve this, it has been necessary for the chairmen of Singapore Press Holdings to be former Cabinet ministers, as if other able Singaporeans lack the instincts to protect national interests.

The net effect of the government’s press policy is that when covering controversial issues where there is a significant divergence between government positions and public opinion, newspapers are expected to educate the public at the expense of reflecting ground sentiment – even if journalists themselves are not persuaded. As government policy states unequivocally, press freedom must be “subordinate to the primacy of purpose of an elected government” in such instances.

The government wants the space to effect unpopular policies that are beneficial for the country in the long term – not a bad thing – but it may end up protecting itself from the kind of accountability that would keep it honest and responsive to the public. And without open debate, it is too easy to slip from the former to the latter.

The online option

Many bloggers and online commentators are motivated by the desire to use the relative freedom of the internet to make up for traditional media’s democratic deficiencies. And certainly, alternative online media are a vital complement to mainstream media. As I argued in my 2006 book, Contentious Journalism, they enable access for voices and interests that, for a mix of reasons, are marginalised by professional, commercial and licensed media sector.

The question is whether they can not only supplement but also substitute for mainstream journalism.

Doubts have been expressed for decades about the power of digital media, some less credible than others. One early question was whether electronic platforms could ever be as practical as ink on paper. Newspapers, it was said, passed the toilet test with flying colours: you can even carry them into the loo with you. IPads and 3G phones have closed that gap, and fewer people make the argument that newspapers are inherently more convenient.

What continues to be taken seriously, though, is the argument that newspapers, for all their faults, are still required for gathering the public in a collective dialogue about matters of public interest. This is the so-called “public sphere” function of the press. The internet as a whole may approximate a public sphere, but the problem is that we don’t engage with the internet as a whole. We visit specific websites and forums, most of which are self-selecting and narrower in their constituencies than national newspapers.

Democracy requires the right to speak, and this is where the internet has come to the fore. But democracy also expects of citizens that we listen, to hear views different from our own, to negotiate and, if necessary, compromise. We need spaces for such deliberation and social conciliation.

The evidence from internet research so far is mixed, with some studies pointing to an echo chamber effect, while others claim that the internet introduces people to a wider range of views than mainstream media do. While there is some evidence that the internet allows people to engage more meaningfully in public life, there are also studies that say that new media equally allow people to distract themselves from public affairs.

But, all said and done, it is probably the case that if newspapers were to die tomorrow, it would be fairly easy for one or more internet sites to fill the void as a space for a national conversation.

Professional journalism

There is, however, a third role that newspapers play that online media show no signs of taking on. As much as our blogs claim to be monitoring the powerful, the reality is that their capacity is extremely limited. One limitation is their lack of training and experience, in making ethical judgment calls and in separating reliable information from gossip. This gap may be overstated. Journalism is not rocket science and I think it is possible for bloggers to develop professional journalism skills.

However, there is a bigger – and so far unbridgeable – gap that we need to take far more seriously. This is the gap between what can be accomplished by large teams of professional, full-time journalists versus small collectives of part-time amateurs. No matter how intelligent, talented and sincere the latter are, there are simply practical limits to what they can accomplish without sufficient time and  organisational back-up.

Yes, they may occasionally cover certain issues comprehensively and thoroughly. When certain events are exciting enough, they may be able to crowd-source investigative reports from an army of committed volunteers. But providing sustained, daily, disciplined monitoring of trends and institutions is beyond them.

Singapore is not a kampong. We are a thriving metropolis of 5 million people with economic activities on a scale that surpasses most countries. Monitoring the opportunities and threats within our country (and beyond our shores) is a prerequisite for individual, household and corporate survival. We can’t do this ourselves (even in partnership with our Facebook friends). And it is also fanciful to imagine that we can delegate the job entirely to amateur, part-time, unpaid citizen reporters.

To reiterate, citizen reporting and alternative media are a vital supplement – but they cannot meet all our democratic needs.

Too much of society’s business takes place during office hours, when our bloggers are busy with their day jobs or in school. And a lot of what needs to be kept track of – meetings, press conferences, reports, community events, business deals – is, quite frankly, so boring that no volunteer would be willing to do it for us. We actually need to pay someone to do it – sit through meetings, read reports cover to cover and so on – to find those bits of information that are relevant and important for the public, and then to connect the dots.

Often, of course, you can find experts in a given field who know a subject better than the most seasoned beat correspondent in a newspaper. No doubt, there are educationists who know their subject better than the education correspondents of the Straits Times, and law professors who understand their subject better than any legal affairs or crime reporter. When such experts blog, they certainly contribute to our collective enlightenment. And they may make us wonder if we need professional journalists any more to analyse things for us.

Again, though, we need to be more circumspect about whether experts turned amateur journalists can actually replace professional journalists entirely. Like other bloggers, these experts tend to be sporadic in their contribution.

But, more importantly, they tend to be embedded in professions and organisations and may feel no responsibility to escape their vested interests. In contrast, journalism as a profession accepts as its core mission (even if it doesn’t always achieve this) circulating information that helps citizens make sense of change and take part in democratic life. No other group claims to want to fill this social role and can be held up to that standard.

No online business model yet

What I’ve been stressing so far is the unique and indispensable function of professional journalism. In theory of course, there is no reason why professional journalism can only take place in newspapers.

In practice, though, newspapers have always provided and continue to provide the most hospitable business model for sustaining professional newsrooms.

Investigation, fact-checking and sense-making for a large, diverse population in a complex, fast-moving society is a resource intensive enterprise. It just cannot be done solely by small teams of part-timers and volunteers. You need newsrooms of 30 to 300 full-time professional journalists.

Can online media sustain such newsrooms? The closest we have to that is Yahoo! News, but although it is the country’s number one online news source, it is obvious that its capacity to generate original content is extremely limited. Regardless of how the ongoing copyright suit filed by SPH against Yahoo! is decided, it is noteworthy that even Yahoo! isn’t claiming that its reporting was original – it is merely claiming that it had a right to crib.

As for our amateur socio-political blogs, some have explored possible revenue streams, but I know of no blog that any longer has pretentions of becoming Singapore’s Malaysiakini (which has daily output in four languages produced by a full-time team of 70).

If a business model can be found for independent online journalism in Singapore, it would be a huge step forward for democratic communication. It would combine the value of professional journalism with the relative freedom of the internet.

But there is no sign that this will arrive soon. Until then, those who believe that greater freedom of expression is necessary for Singapore’s democratic progress should understand that newspapers must be part of the solution. And if Singaporeans feel that the press system is underperforming, they need to reform it – not ignore it.

by

CHERIAN GEORGE

August 13th, 2012

One of the biggest challenges I set myself in writing Freedom From The Press was to ensure that an essentially academic monograph would also be accessible by the lay public. To get published by a university press requires a certain theoretical weight that the general audience often finds intolerable. NUS Press was satisfied that I had met its rigorous criteria for scholarship. But, would the book end up as yet another turgid text read only by researchers and reluctant graduate students? I’m happy to note TOC’s reviewerdescribing it as a “largely journalistic narrative”.

In fact, I may have disguised the academic stuffing too well. Vernon Chan, apparently one of those who believes that a scholarly book must shout its theoretical pretensions in polysyllabic prose, seems to feel cheated that it is not analytical enough. Fortunately for me, NUS Press – one of Asia’s top academic publishers – applied less lofty standards than Chan.

His review makes a number of other curious claims. One of them is that my account of the PAP’s taming of the press is “mostly sourced from Mary Turnbull’s pro-establishment account of press history”. I make no apologies for drawing on Turnbull, since she is probably the only historian who has had access to newspaper publishers’ files and interviews with their senior management. But Chan’s claim that I’ve relied mostly on her work is demonstrably false. He just had to check the footnotes and count them: five from Turnbull vs. eight from Francis Seow – not exactly a pro-establishment source. I’ve also relied heavily on the accounts of other dissenting Singaporeans from the past (like Said Zahari) and present (like Martyn See and James Gomez), alongside the establishment voices such as S. R. Nathan and of course Lee Kuan Yew.

Chan also suggests that the book is a “rehash” of existing literature. I’m glad that I have made my debts to past work so clear, for there is a lot to be learnt from previous work. But TOC’s reviewer seems to have missed the fact that my book includes the only published compilation of the use of the Internal Security Act against journalists and writers, the result of painstaking original research by my assistant; and findings from the most representative survey ever done of Singapore journalists, carried out together with my colleague Hao Xiaoming.

Chan ends by pointing out that “social framing analysis”* is entirely missing from my book. As every experienced hack knows, this is the easiest, laziest way to write a critical review of anything: just attack what the work doesn’t do. (Example: “The Dark Knight’s box office success notwithstanding, it is sorely lacking in catchy musical numbers and original dance routines.”) Framing analysis is one of innumerable approaches to studying media; and it is applied mainly in media effects research – something that my book never claims to be engaged in, any more than Christopher Nolan was targeting Broadway. Freedom From The Press, as the back cover states, studies how the government has tamed the press. I leave what Chan correctly identifies as “pertinent” questions about media effects to other scholars to pursue.

Chan’s odd interpretation of my research extends to my past work. In his introduction, he claims that I’m known for advocating “fairer and more balanced” blogs that imitate mainstream media. Here, Chan takes us into bizzaro world. My PhD research, resulting in my previous book, Contentious Journalism and the Internet, made exactly the opposite point. It was nothing if not an argument for broadening the definition of journalism to include alternative forms that do not resemble mainstream, professional journalism. Everything substantial about alternative media that I have written in the past 10 years – including drafts that are currently on my computer – is associated with the view that we need media diversity, and not convergence around a false consensus that has been maintained by hegemonic domination of the press. My chapter on citizen media in Freedom From The Press says the opposite of what Chan suggests.

Perhaps he has not actually read either my past writing or even the whole book that he claims to be reviewing. Or perhaps my academic writing is not as digestible as he suggests or as I would like to believe. There is yet another possible explanation, though. It could just be that Chan is intent on proving that he has a more radical, critical take on Singapore media and politics than I do. I have absolutely no doubt that he does. But I would have learnt more from his review if he had worked harder to show it.

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* Communication students should note that Chan probably means “framing analysis” or “media framing analysis”, and not “social framing analysis”; the term “social framing” isn’t usually used in media studies, and I can’t seem to find any results for “social framing analysis” in any social science database or Google Scholar.

by

CHERIAN GEORGE

June 11th, 2012

Originally published at http://cheriangeorge.tumblr.com/

Singapore sometimes seems like a metropolis in search of a kampung spirit. And I don’t mean in a good way, like being caring and considerate – if you’ve seen how Singaporean drivers respond to an ambulance behind them (they don’t) you’d realise that when Gotong Royong 101 was being taught in kindergarten, they were probably absorbed in mental sums and other essential skills to get ahead of the pack.

No, the kampung spirit that we Singaporeans are cultivating is instead a kaypoh-ish petty-mindedness; a small-town mentality that tells us that no event is too trivial to turn into a national issue.

You may have heard of that classic formulation of headline news: if it bleeds, it leads. But since Singapore is not a particularly violent society, our scandal-seekers have had to make the most of the merely unpleasant. Their twist on the newsman’s mantra is: if it offends, it trends.

And with the internet, there’s no shortage of anti-social words and actions to dissect and discuss if you are so inclined. So, instead of limiting yourself to gossiping about what you saw through the window of your neighbour’s home as you walked by, you can peek at hundreds of thousands of Facebook walls where people obligingly make fools of themselves.

Thus, Singapore – one of the world’s great entrepôts and financial centres, with dreams of being a cosmopolitan world city like New York or London – works itself into a tizzy over inconsequential internet indiscretions of insignificant individuals almost every week.

Our mainstream media are contributing to this provincialism. But independent news websites play the leading role in setting the agenda, bridging the gap between more private sections of the internet and the more public web. Since they do not have the resources to investigate official malfeasance, our citizen reporters seem to have latched onto the formula of doing investigative exposés of individual idiocy.

Readers like me who subscribe (for now) to RSS feeds of the likes of Temasek Times, in the hope that they will tell me something important that the mainstream media aren’t,  find ourselves being served a steady diet of news concerning the silly things that random persons happen to be doing online. Welcome to kampung Singapore.

With the F-U-gate scandal, we’ve reached a new low. A 17-year-old junior college kid flames the deputy prime minister and it becomes a national event.

Has our fascination for the frivolous gone too far, I wonder. After this latest controversy, Yahoo! News asked me if it was time for an internet code of ethics. Perhaps it is. But not the kind of code you think. I think it’s time for readers to exercise more responsibility. Here’s the kind of thing that could go into an internet consumer code:

We, as responsible consumers of the internet in Singapore, pledge the following:

• We will finally wake up to the idea that the internet contains all the wonder and weirdness of the world, and we’ll stop reacting to the less pleasant stuff as if it is the end of human civilisation.

• We will remind ourselves that teenagers are – like they always have been and always will be – basically daft. We’ll leave it to their parents, teachers and peers to set them right, and award them amnesty till they are 21. We’ll try not to circulate the stuff that they’ll regret saying and doing when they are adults, and we’ll certainly avoid publicising their names.

• We won’t exploit private individuals’ online mistakes as ammunition in our battles against groups we don’t like. Whether we want to prove that the internet should be censored, or to embarrass the political party that they belong to, or to tarnish the immigration policies that brought them here, or to show how intolerant some religious groups are, or how immoral some sub-cultures are, we won’t crucify random chaps who did something silly online.

• If we think there’s nothing good on the internet, we will go read a book. If we think there’s both good and bad, we’ll try to help the good go viral and let the bad sink into oblivion – instead of the reverse.

• We will use our smarts to decide what we really need to get worked up about. We’ll treat trolleys on buses as entertaining trivia; and focus more attention on climate change and Millennium Development Goals, on Syria, Sudan… and, all right, Euro 2012.

by

CHERIAN GEORGE

June 2nd, 2012

Above: This afternoon’s event at Hong Lim Park commemorated the 25th anniversary of Operation Spectrum. It was organised by Maruah and Function 8. Read Yawning Bread’s report of the event.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Operation Spectrum, the arrests under the Internal Security Act of young Singaporean activists who were labelled Marxist conspirators. The use of the ISA as a means to tame the media is described in my book, Freedom From The Press. Here is an extract from the book.

The list of individuals detained since the PAP came to power in 1959 includes several who were involved in media, although many of them were hauled up not for their media work as such, but for their activities in opposition parties, trade unions and other organisations. Targets of the 1963 crackdown included Singapore National Union of Journalists secretary general A. Mahadeva of The Straits Times and committee member James Fu Chiao Sian of Nanyang Siang Pau (who would later become press secretary to Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew). Others such as Poh Soo Kai and Tan Jing Quee were involved with the left-wing undergraduate magazine Fajar. Said Zahari, jailed for 17 years, was editor of the opposition Barisan Sosialis party’s Malay newsletter, Rakyat, and before that editor of the Malay daily Utusan Melayu. Lim Hock Siew edited Barisan’s English organ, Plebeian.

In the decade or so after independence, the ISA was used against several individuals working for mainstream Chinese and Malay media organisations. Before the milestone May 1971 crackdown on Nanyang Siang Pau, Ngiam Tong Hai of the same paper (1966) and Julius Yeh Sai Fu of Sin Chew Jit Poh (1971) were detained. Nanyang Siang Pau chairman Lee Eu Seng was detained for five years from 1973. In 1974, three Sin Chew Jit Poh staffers were among 31 people detained as alleged members of the Malayan National Liberation Front. In 1976, Berita Harian editor Hussein Jahidin and assistant editor Nahar Azmi Mahmud were arrested for allegedly sowing discontent and propagating communist thinking among Malays as part of a plot masterminded by the PAP’s left-wing founder member Samad Ismail. In 1977, Min Pao Daily journalist Kwok Chong Kwee was detained for ten days in connection with alleged pro-communist activities. In February 1977, the ISA was directed at the foreign media. Arun Senkuttuvan, who wrote for the Far Eastern Economic Review and other overseas publications, was detained for two months and stripped of his citizenship. Then, in March, the same magazine’s reporter Ho Kwong Ping was detained for seven weeks until 29 April.

Operation Spectrum of 1987 ensnared two individuals who were, among other activities, involved in publishing an underground newsletter that allegedly contained hostile and left-wing views about army life, and two others accused of infiltrating the Workers’ Party organ, Hammer. There were also two subtitling editors with the national broadcaster and a journalist with the Malaysian daily New Straits Times — but these media employees were not accused of using their outlets as part of their Marxist conspiracy. Therefore, Operation Spectrum could not really be characterised as a crackdown on journalism. Instead, the last time the ISA detention was used as an instrument of media regulation was 1977. Ho Kwon Ping, whom the government would appoint 20–30 years later as a statutory board chairman, chairman of the national broadcaster MediaCorp and president of Singapore Management University, would hold the additional distinction of being the last person to suffer ISA detention in the line of professional journalistic duty. Since then, the government has been able to count on the NPPA to create a culture of self-restraint in domestic newspapers. Defamation suits, contempt of court charges, circulation restrictions and work permit controls became the preferred tools for disciplining the foreign media.

There were other signs of a government re-think of its use of the ISA. By the late 1970s, American diplomats were noting that some detainees were being released despite not publicly renouncing communism or armed revolution. Some detainees refused to make such statements on the grounds that this was tantamount to admitting that they had believed in communist revolution in the first place. To break the stalemate, the government was willing to release them with restrictions. As Singapore’s security landscape changed, it may have also occurred to the government that overuse of the ISA would strain credibility. As early as 1977, the US State Department’s human rights report on Singapore registered the fact that the ISA was originally justified in connection with communist insurgency but that the definition of a “security case” was now being extended to include “those who portray Singapore as a state in which individual liberties are curtailed or the Singapore Government as undemocratic, totalitarian, autocratic and ‘oppressive’; and those journalists whose reporting is considered by the Government of Singapore to be slanted and therefore capable of being exploited by communists”.

Operation Spectrum of 1987 dispelled any doubts that a Cabinet made up mainly of second generation leaders had the stomach for using the ISA. In hindsight, though, the swoop could be said to have crossed a threshold — the point of diminishing returns — causing the government to reconsider its menu of coercion. The problem was not the objections from international human rights monitors, the Catholic church or Singapore’s liberals, since the PAP continues to draw a certain macho pride from its immunity to such external pressures. More worryingly, the government was finding it hard to convince even insiders. Goh Chok Tong, who was deputy prime minister at the time, revealed in an interview for the 2009 history of the PAP, Men in White, that his Cabinet colleague S. Dhanabalan “was not fully comfortable with the action which we took”. This, Goh said, was a reason for Dhanabalan’s eventual shock resignation from government. Dhanabalan was no lightweight or liberal: as culture minister, he had banned Cosmopolitan for its permissive values. He had also been named by Lee Kuan Yew as premier-material but for the fact that Singapore’s Chinese majority would not accept an Indian prime minister.

A young civil servant who was questioned as part of the Operation Spectrum investigations, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, voiced his doubts to the press when he was inducted into politics in 2001. “Although I did not have access to the same intelligence as the ISD, basically, those whom I knew had a strong social conscience and did not have a destructive political agenda,” he told The Straits Times in 2001. Tharman would go on to become deputy prime minister. Another establishment figure, legal scholar Walter Woon, who would serve as an ambassador and then briefly as attorney general, expressed his scepticism in 1991. “As far as I am concerned, the government’s case is still not proven. I would not say those fellows were Red, not from the stuff they presented,” he told The Straits Times.

Ironically, the ISA’s obsolescence as a censorship tool was probably sealed in 2001, when it had to be used against a bona fide security threat. The discovery of a Jemaah Islamiyah cell plotting terrorist attacks and with links to Al Qaeda suddenly demanded a more judicious use of the ISA. At all costs, the authorities had to avoid giving Singapore’s Muslims the impression that they were being targeted as a community. Its need for the support and cooperation of the wider Muslim community meant that the government had to act with precision and credibility. It could no longer apply the ISA in as loose and sweeping a fashion as in earlier decades, when anyone critical could be labelled a communist. In the past, it could be said that the government benefited from the climate of fear induced by an ill-defined ISA; post-2001, however, the authorities wanted the ISA to inspire public confidence, not paranoia. After decades of being perceived as a convenient political weapon, it would have to return to its security roots.

Francis Seow’s 1988 detention marked the last fresh arrest of a non-violent political opponent under the ISA. Since then, the Singapore government has honoured an undeclared moratorium on detention orders as a means of controlling dissent. Malaysia provides an interesting contrast. It continued to use the ISA against opposition members and other peaceful activists. As recently as 2008, Malaysia arrested under the ISA a mainstream newspaper journalist for accurately reporting a ruling party politician’s inflammatory outburst. In keeping with the theory of calibrated coercion, Malaysia’s kneejerk use of the law delegitimised the ISA in the eyes of a broad swathe of public opinion and made it a political issue in itself, compelling the Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak to promise its repeal in 2011 in order to shore up his position. In contrast, Singapore’s human rights activists have had a harder time building up public support against the ISA, which is widely seen as a necessary national security tool.

From:

Freedom From The Press: Journalism and State Power in Singapore, NUS Press, 2012.

Above: A calendar belonging to lawyer Teo Soh Lung. She never got to tear off this page because life as she knew it ended the next day, when she was arrested and detained under the ISA. The calendar and other poignant artifacts were displayed at the Hong Lim Park event. Singaporean human rights group Maruah is organising a petition for a commission of inquiry into the arrests, “so that the nation can truly begin to heal and put this traumatic event in our history behind us”.

by

CHERIAN GEORGE

May 25th, 2012

Some internet users are embedded with a special microchip that wirelessly connects their keyboards to the ugliest recesses of their brains – bypassing common sense and conscience. This technology enables superfast uploading of comments, both vile and juvenile. With very little effort, it inflates the user’s ego and gives him an exaggerated sense of accomplishment, making him feel more potent than he is in real life.

Most of the experienced bloggers I know who have been victims of this (anti-)social media phenomenon have opted for the high road. When on the receiving end of crude personal attacks, they stay on the moral high ground. They have learnt to brush aside such flaming as just one of those things – the price we have to pay for freedom of expression on the internet.

Popular blogger Xiaxue has taken a different tack. Incensed at some of the invective scrawled on Temasek Review’s Facebook wall, she has hit back by exposing the individuals responsible.

The thing about the aforementioned software is that it’s not exactly rocket science, so its users have no guarantee that their targets won’t pick it up and use it against them. They are usually counting on the fact that the victim is more civilised (or busier) than they are (both generally safe assumptions), and that he or she therefore won’t descend to an eye-for-an-eye online shootout.

Enter Xiaxue.

I don’t follow her blog, and what little I know of it tends to fill me with despair. This is an admittedly elitist perspective, but the fact that more Singaporeans read her than, say, Yawning Bread, Diary of a Singaporean Mind, Siew Kum Hong or Rambling Librarian doesn’t say much for the discernment of Singaporean internet users.

But there is something to be said for the way Xiaxue handles herself in the rough and tumble of cyberspace.

Temasek Review posted a photo of her and her girlfriends on its Facebook wall, inviting readers to provide captions. Predictably, the exercise generated a number of off-colour remarks at her expense. Less predictably, she reached behind some of the vile comments and plucked out a couple of fine specimens of Singaporean manhood for all to see.

Relying on the men’s own public Facebook profiles, she revealed details like their ages and occupations along with rather unflattering pictures. “I’ve always wondered if people who call me fugly are bloody good looking themselves,” she commented about one. “So I thought you must look like Brad Pitt. But you look more like an armpit.”

Then there was the guy who remarked “pretty and sexy girls which part of geylang do they work?”

Xiaxue shot back by publishing a photo of him, his wife and their two babies. “He is married with two cute kids. I wonder how he will feel like if in future men ask his daughter which part of geylang she works at?”

Another man compared Xiaxue to Geylang prostitutes and underaged hookers, apparently assuming that his comments would remain in the underground world of TR’s Facebook wall. But Xiaxue published his comments together with a family portrait of him, his wife and baby.

The juxtaposition of this image of family bliss (apparently how he would like the world to see him) with evidence of his inner demons must have come as quite a shock for him. Interviewed in today’s Straits Times, the 35-year-old engineer sputtered that she had it coming, because she did not dress conservatively enough. He whined that she should have left his family out of it, and that his wife “feels really bad”.

Pity his belated bout of sensitivity towards family members’ feelings did not extend to Xiaxue’s husband.

Xiaxue’s final shot: “Maybe you will think twice before you call somebody a whore next time, huh?”

The wimp that I am, I would probably still opt for the less gangster-ish approach to online attacks. But perhaps there is a place for Xiaxue’s blazing-guns response in parts of cyberspace where civility cuts no ice. Reading her blog filled me with the same guilty, vicarious pleasure that I get out of a good Mafia movie.

To paraphrase Sean Connery in The Untouchables:

“They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.

“That’s the Xiaxue way.”

My book, Freedom From The Press, is now available at most bookshops in Singapore. Please visit my book site for more information.

by

CHERIAN GEORGE

March 11th, 2012

Edited version of a talk at the Association of Muslim Professionals’ Community In Review seminar 2012 on 10 March. The theme of the seminar was “To Post or Not To Post: Multiculturalism in the Social Media”.

The internet has provided a public platform for the best of human characteristics to be displayed, but also for the worst. We don’t know whether the internet makes things worse by encouraging anti-social speech, or whether it just publicises what used to be said in private. What is clear is that, in the past, gatekeepers of the mainstream media – newspaper editors and broadcast news producers – acted as filters to make sure that any offensive speech from the ground could not reach the wider public. The internet bypasses these gatekeepers, which means that the journey from thought to private utterance to public statement is almost instant.

No matter how hard we work at developing media literacy, we should not expect to be rid of all racially offensive speech online. There are two broad ways to respond to these breaches. We can reach out horizontally and together with our fellow citizens repair the damage by persuading others to reject harmful ideas. Or, we can reach up vertically to government, getting the authorities to act against irresponsible speech by using the law. The advantage of the latter is that it seems more efficient, punishing those who cross the line of acceptability and violate social norms, and deterring others from doing the same. The horizontal approach works through persuasion rather than the law, so it is slower and not foolproof.

All societies use a mix of approaches to address offensive speech. In international law, like at the European court of human rights and more and more jurisdictions, there is growing feeling that the law should really be a last resort and only used for the most extreme speech – speech that incites violence in a very direct way, or that is part of a campaign that violates the rights of minorities to live free of discrimination. In contrast, simply insulting and offending others, even if feelings are very hurt, is not seen as something that should invite a legal response. Using the law to protect feelings is too great an encroachment on freedom of speech.

Singapore draws the line differently. Our laws are written very broadly, such that any sort of offence, even if it does not threaten imminent violence, is seen as deserving of strict regulation. This probably reflects a very strong social consensus that race and religion should be handled delicately. So we tend to rely on strong government. The state protects racial and religious sensibilities from offence, using censorship when there’s a danger of words and actions causing hurt.

Thus, for several years now, we have seen many examples of offensive online speech prompting police investigations. In 2005, three young bloggers were convicted under the Sedition Act for racist comments. There have been other cases since then where the police have been called in to investigate offensive speech.

These cases are striking in two ways. First, it is interesting that in almost all cases, state action was instigated by complaints from members of the public. This is quite unlike political censorship, where action is initiated by the government, often with great resistance and opposition from netizens. In a string of cases involving racial and religious offence, however, it’s the netizens who tend to demand action, sometimes acting like a lynch mob.

Second, it is striking that in many cases, the offensive messages were spread further by those reporting the offence. In one case late last year, a blogger posted a religiously offensive image on his own facebook wall to warn others that this image was making the rounds. One of his so-called friends took offence and circulated it more widely on the internet in addition to making a police report. In the case involving a Christian pastor’s offensive sermon, most Singaporeans who have seen the video did not see it on the church website where the video was originally found, but via Hardware Zone, one of Singapore’s most popular forums. It was put there not by the pastor himself or his church members, but by someone who wanted action taken against the pastor.

This pattern is paradoxical. What is the justification for strong police action against any form of speech? Why do we sometimes feel that it may not be enough to counter bad speech with good speech in free and open debate, and that we must instead use the law to stop the bad speech? Surely, it must be because we think the bad speech is so dangerous that it can cause immediate harm; or because we don’t trust the public to respond rationally, so we don’t know if good speech would indeed triumph in open debate. Usually, if we call in the authorities, it must be because we have a mental picture of offensive speech being like lighting a match in a combustible atmosphere. It is dangerous and there’s no time to debate the merits of that match – we just have to put it out.

The irony of most of the cases that we have seen in the past few years is that the people demanding government action, as if the offensive words were explosive, were also those who helped to spread them. It is like helping to spread a fire while calling for the fire brigade.

Unless these complainants were just plain irrational or irresponsible, which I don’t think they were, their act of spreading the offensive content must mean that they did not actually believe that the expression was really that dangerous in the sense of prompting violence through reprisal attacks or riots. In reposting the offensive words or pictures, they showed that they actually trusted the public enough to respond sympathetically – they had faith that enough people would add their voices to the outrage that they themselves felt when they saw the offensive images or videos or words. And they were right: in every case, when these offensive messages were publicised, the overwhelming sentiment was that these messages were wrong, were anti-Singaporean. People who may have shared those thoughts were quickly reminded that they were not in line with Singaporean norms. The public debate reinforced our multi-racial and multi-religious foundations.

This then raises the question, why the need to involve the police at all? If Singaporeans are grown-up enough to defend their society against offensive speech, why have calls for prosecution and censorship become the automatic response?

I wonder if this is an example of the well-known habit of unthinkingly relying on government to solve all our problems even when, with a little bit of effort in the form of grassroots action can do the job. One problem with the culture of expecting police action whenever we feel insulted or offended is that this mechanism can be overused and abused. Those most likely to complain against any expression are the least tolerant members of each religious or ethnic community. Very quickly, therefore, the most dogmatic and extreme spokesmen set the tone for the rest of society.

Yes, we need to beware of offensive speech that is part of a deliberate campaign of hate-mongering. But let’s not be naïve. It’s not just giving offence, but also taking offence, that can be used as part of a political game. Usually, what looks like spontaneous and visceral reactions to offensive speech – angry demonstrations and so on – are orchestrated by activists who spot a political advantage in an outpouring of anger. In Singapore, I doubt that every netizen who demanded action against this or that offensive message was purely driven by concern for Singapore’s multiracial fabric. I am quite sure that in some cases, they simply saw the opportunity for some kind of political advantage against individuals or groups that they have on-going political feud with.

There is also overwhelming evidence internationally that the effect of outlawing blasphemy – which many well-meaning Singaporeans might intuitively feel is a good idea – backfires by allowing religious majorities to persecute religious minorities. Since offensiveness is subjective, it is possible for the dominant group to claim that its beliefs are being blasphemed by the peaceful religious expressions of a minority group. It can thus use the law to marginalise religious minorities. We see this in Malaysia. In Singapore, it should not be up to the state to decide which religious beliefs or schools of thought within a religion deserve legal protection – possible victims of such a move might include Singapore’s small Shia Muslim minority, which has long felt marginalised by the dominant Sunni school.

Another problem with this vertical approach, reaching up to higher authorities, is that it perpetuates a dependency on government and doesn’t do much for building horizontal trust, that is, trust between citizens. Such trust is ultimately the best defence in a world where we will never be able to control 100% of the messages 100% of the time, even if government regulators were given more powers.

Horizontal trust is important, because that is what helps us put things in perspective when we face provocations. Most offensive messages are not, by themselves, threatening, They are like a lighted a match. Whether there is an explosion depends on the context. It is mistrust that acts like an accelerant, like combustible gas in a confined space. Increasingly, we cannot control the text – the match. But we can influence the context. By building horizontal trust, our society will become more resilient against the inevitable frictions and frustrations of living among people of different cultures.

I believe that in many cases, Singaporeans make police reports when they encounter offensive speech not necessarily because they want the speaker to be punished, but because they want a strong public signal to reaffirm our multi-racial and multi-religious principles. They want reassurance. They want to bring the weight of moderate public opinion to bear on a dispute, plus perhaps a clear signal from the authorities as to what constituted acceptable speech. If so, why not just demand such statements instead of legal action. Even better, why not mobilise and organise civil society against such breaches.

The next time people encounter racist or religiously offensive speech, it would be nice to see swift responses from credible and respected civil society groups, Members of Parliament, and other ordinary citizens. If the speaker doesn’t get the message, organise boycotts, for example, and give him or her the clear message that our society isn’t going to take such offence lying down. The more we can respond ourselves through open debate and grassroots action, without the need to ask law and order to step in, the stronger our society will be.

by

CHERIAN GEORGE

March 11th, 2012

I was quoted in today’s Today suggesting that prominent independent websites come together to develop a voluntary code of ethics. An equally important point I made to the reporter was not carried in Today‘s article: that there is no need for any tightening of government regulation of online political debate. It’s important to see these as complementary ideas. Bloggers won’t consider voluntarily modulating their voices as long as they feel the government’s hands around their throats.

Substituting government regulation with community moderation is a principle that was contained in the Bloggers 13 proposal, which I co-authored with Choo Zheng Xi of The Online Citizen, Alex Au of Yawning Bread, Gerald Giam and other bloggers. Our report said that bloggers were prepared to take steps towards responsible, accountable blogging. It even proposed an Internet Content Consultative Committee (IC3) as an avenue for community moderation. But this had to be part of comprehensive reforms in which the government would roll back regulation of political debate. Singapore’s laws and regulations on freedom of expression needed to be revised to conform with international norms and best practices, the position paper said.

The more experienced and better-run blogs know that they have nothing to lose, and much to gain, by committing to a voluntary code of ethics – it would help distinguish them from the pack. This applies in mainstream journalism (it is usually highest-quality news outlets – like the New York Times and BBC – that invest the most in accountability mechanisms such as codes of ethics and ombudsmen) and should apply in citizen journalism as well. In a crowded market, organisations can “brand by values“, as some journalism thought leaders have put it.

But any code of ethics or mechanism for community moderation will only take off if it is devised entirely by practitioners, with not even the slightest hint of official influence or control. Even if totally independent, it would be difficult enough for any group of bloggers, no matter how well respected, to persuade others to adopt a code. Herding cats would be simpler. The merest whiff of government involvement would destroy any chance of success – that would be like trying to herd cats while walking a dog.

The best thing the government can do to encourage the process is to provide a clear and unambiguous signal that it will not tighten the regulation of political speech. As Bloggers 13 argued, Singapore needs something like a Malaysian-style “no censorship” guarantee.

So, if bloggers do not respond to the government’s calls to self-regulate, it is not necessarily for want of a sense of social responsibility. It’s more likely to be due to a lack of trust in the government’s commitment to freedom of speech.