JOURNALISM.cheriangeorge.net

Tag: general election

  • Online campaigning: more freedom to shoot oneself in the foot

    by

    CHERIAN GEORGE

    March 15th, 2011

    The liberalisation of online campaigning rules raises intriguing questions about the upcoming polls. At one level, the move merely acknowledges the new realities, as Alex Au of Yawning Bread told the Today newspaper. But, so much more space is being opened up for legitimate use that one is bound to ask:

    What’s the catch?

    The obvious catch is that this is a liberalisation of so-called prior restraints (rules that shut you up before you’ve had a chance to say anything) but doesn’t necessarily represent any easing in post-publication punishments (getting you for what you actually say).

    Parties would be unwise to assume that defamation law, in particular, will be any less relevant in Campaign 2011. The government does not accept that the cut and thrust of campaigning is an excuse for politicians to sully opponents’ reputations with allegations that they can’t prove in court.

    So, it’s been the case that general election season would be followed by defamation suit season. Opposition politicians in high spirits on the rally ground would crash down to earth in court. Learning from this, parties were far more careful with their words in the last GE. But now there’s a chance that the multiplication of online platforms and the ease of publication will encourage politicians to cast caution to the wind.

    Most of us have had personal experience of how new media miraculously transports one’s foot into one’s mouth. The question is whether this tendency will translate into more defamation suits in this GE, now that red lights have turned green. Note that the regulations require parties to declare which online media are part of whose campaigns. This will make it easier for lawyers to know exactly whom to address their letters to.

    I’m not suggesting that the move is part of a conspiracy to entrap the opposition. But even if exposure to defamation suits is not the intention, that could be the effect. The PAP won’t subject everyone’s postings to legal scrutiny. But if it decides that a particular opposition politician needs to be utterly demolished, you can bet that no tweet of his would be too tiny, no Facebook update too fleeting, to be given the CSI treatment in order a build the case against the individual.

    Parties will have to think carefully about whether the potential benefits of an aggressive online media strategy outweigh the risks of saying things they shouldn’t say and being sued for it.

    The second catch is a related one: while electronic bandwidth may be virtually unlimited, executive bandwidth is still finite. The internet will take anything, but somebody’s got to decide what to feed it.

    Now that parties are allowed to use the new media more, who will actually produce the content? More importantly, who will check and edit the content before it’s uploaded? This may be a non-issue for an internet forum or portal, but it’s an important consideration for a political party: what’s posted needs to be in line with the party’s election strategy – and shouldn’t score own goals.

    This internal management challenge is probably why some parties – including the People’s Action Party and the Workers’ Party – have been quieter than one might expect online. The technical capabilities and manpower are there, but these big parties apparently haven’t cracked the puzzle of how to marry the spontaneity and informality of cyberspace with the need to stay on message. Both parties have had gaffes related to this problem. The WP had internal disputes soon after the last GE over how much leeway members should have online. The PAP has had its share online missteps.

    Workers’ Party 2006 candidate James Gomez has noted in an academic article that “a culture of caution and the parties’ control over its members’ online communications” are among the reasons why their online outreach has been “less than optimal”. Chia Ti Lik, one of the WP’s most promising young candidates, attributed his resignation to the party leadership’s “overly conservative” approach. He has set up his own party, the Socialist Front.

    Based on its far superior numbers and the lack of any fear factor, you might expect the PAP to have the most substantial online presence. However, the latest article posted on the Young PAP website is almost two weeks old; and only three articles were posted in the month of February. The ruling party appears to be facing a similar bottleneck as WP.

    The challenge will only intensify during the hustings. It is tough enough staying in command of the conventional campaign battlefield. On top of that, to manage round-the-clock online platforms will require party leaders to have either superhuman multitasking skills or the confidence to cede control to activists who can run their online campaigns on their behalf. So far, the PAP and WP seem to be reluctant to embrace the latter strategy, opting instead for a less lively and less risky online strategy.

    The party with the most prolific online machinery is instead the Singapore Democratic Party. Clearly, it has an able team of cyber activists in place, proficient in all the newly permitted technologies – and, apparently, empowered by the party leaders to muck around in the online sandbox. (Gomez, one of the country’s pioneers of cyber activism, joined the SDP after he quit WP.)

    The SDP therefore stands to benefit the most from the latest liberalisation. No doubt, though, the party’s online strategy will come under severe test. Take, for example, something posted prominently on its website yesterday: a letter accusing the Singapore embassy in Japan of failing in its duties because an email addressed to it got an unhelpful auto-reply. But a quick check of the MFA website would have revealed a 24-hour hotline for Singaporeans to reach the embassy. (A relation happened to call me last Friday wondering how to contact the embassy; I was able to check and give her the number within less than a minute.)

    One can understand a stressed-out individual shooting off an angry letter. But a political party or media organisation might need to be more careful about what allegations it chooses to publish if it wants to avoid injuring itself during and after the coming campaign. So there’s the catch: the liberalisation of online campaigning rules gives parties the freedom to shoot themselves in the foot.

  • Tin Pei Ling’s baptism of fire: Should bloggers have lit the match?

    by

    CHERIAN GEORGE

    March 30th, 2011

    There’s an old saying, attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche, that goes something like, “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.”

    There’s an older and more famous saying, “Thou shall not kill.”

    These two different takes on adversity are, of course, not really contradictory. The quote from Nietzsche advises us to raise our threshold for pain because, after all, shit happens. “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering,” the 19th century philosopher also said. Or maybe it was Maya Angelou. Or Oprah Winfrey.

    None of these self-help gurus would go on to say that we should help those around us get stronger and find meaning in life by inflicting pain on them. That’s where the universal golden rule comes in, that whatever we wouldn’t want for ourselves – including near-death experiences – we shouldn’t do to others.

    I got thinking about this as I read about the current online storm over would-be PAP candidate Tin Pei Ling. It’s not a life-and-death story worthy of airtime on Oprah’s final season, by a long shot, but it does raise some ethical issues for journalism and election coverage.

    Never mind that Tin (unlike most high-flying PAP candidates) has several years’ grassroots experience; sections of the online community have dismissed the possibility that someone so young – she is in her 20s – could serve in the highest forum in the land. (I recall feeling similarly skeptical when Eunice Olsen was put up as an NMP. She proved me wrong and I have learnt not to prejudge.)

    That is nothing, though, compared with the attack by Temasek Review, the anonymously-run website with lofty ambitions “to foster an informed, educated, thinking and proactive citizenry.”

    The website delved into her personal life – even questioning her motives for marrying her husband – to present her as a materialistic, social climbing monster. Such attacks have also been flying around social media.

    Siew Kum Hong, hardly a PAP apologist, has had the intellectual honesty and moral courage to come out swiftly in his blog against this distasteful turn of events.

    However, some others have argued that election candidates should expect such a baptism of fire. One blogger, while agreeing that the incident was “unfortunate”, said with Nietzsche-like logic, “If Ms. Tin is made of sterner stuff, she’ll live through this. If our future political leaders don’t have the tenacity to look past the Glee-like slushies and take the hit for the citizens of Singapore, then I don’t think they deserve my vote in the first place.”

    I agree that how Tin and her party leaders respond to this episode will say a lot about their preparedness for the new terrain.

    This, however, doesn’t really excuse those who have chosen to corrupt that terrain.

    Some online posters have argued that the PAP is just reaping what it has sown: it has made life ugly for those who dare to enter Opposition politics, deterring many able individuals from joining other parties; now it’s payback time, time for the PAP can get a taste of its own medicine.

    Certainly, the online world should help to level what is undoubtedly a tilted offline playing field. This imperative is what motivates some of Singapore’s best online journalism.

    But, there are surely some limits. Websites that say they want to help raise the level of Singapore’s political discourse shouldn’t go lower than the politicians themselves.

    And the truth is that the political parties have been more civilised than they’ve been given credit for. Think back to the Workers’ Party’s calm under fire when attacked by the PAP over the so-called James Gomez affair. And consider the restraint that the PAP showed over the sensational revelations about one Opposition leader’s penchant for photographing himself in the nude. What they may say in private is another matter, but what’s contributed to the stream of public discourse should meet some basic level of civility.

    Rational politicians know they shouldn’t totally poison the waters in which they swim. Perhaps it’s time for Singapore’s citizen journalists to start making similar calculations.