New highs for ministerial salaries, new lows for media credi
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New highs for ministerial salaries, new lows for media credibility
http://www.yawningbread.org/arch_2007/yax-824.htm
I have to thank Benjamin Cheah for his article in The Online Citizen where he provided a hyperlink to a survey on the perceptions of media in 14 countries, conducted by the respected polling firm, Synovate.
1,011 people in Singapore were polled for the Singapore part of the survey, out of 11,344 worldwide.
Without that link I had little more to rely on than the reports in our local newspapers which highlighted how 48% of Singaporeans agreed that controls on the media are sometimes needed to preserve stability, while 43% felt that press freedom is non-negotiable. That would have been wonderful news for those who needed justification for the kind of media we have here.
Our local press did point out that Singapore was one of only 3 countries -- the other two being Russia and India, countries where indeed social, ethnic and religious unrest are very close to the surface -- that preferred controls over freedom, but I think we need to ask, is this an informed choice, or the result of a generation of brainwashing and scaremongering?
India has a very free press and people seem to have freely come to this opinion in the light of their national experience. Russia in the 1990s had a period of very free press too. Singaporeans have not experienced a free press for 40 years, so how do they know they don't want it?
Then this sentence in a newspaper report really got me:
Despite the fact that the media here was perceived "as less free than in any other country surveyed", 36 per cent gave the local press a high freedom rating.
-- 'Today' newspaper, 11 Dec 2007,
Social stability is key: Poll
You notice how it was spun into good news -- "Despite the fact..."? Don't be fooled. The real fact is that "36 percent" was the lowest score of all 14 countries surveyed.
The survey question had asked participants this:
On a scale of 5 to 1, where 5 means "very free" and 1 means "not at all free", how free do you think the press and media is in your country to be able to report the news accurately, truthfully and without undue bias?
9% of Singapore participants gave a score of "5" as their answer, 27% gave a score of "4", adding up to 36%.
Here are the results from all 14 countries to the same question. We're bottom of the class again.
(Where the totals do not reach 100%, it's because of the "Don't knows". You'd notice that Singapore also has the highest percentage of "Don't knows": 10%. That's a very bad sign. Too many Singaporeans are apathetic, uninterested and uninformed.)
Our government likes to boast that our local mainstream media are free. The difference from the West, it is alleged, may be that here, they are also aware of their responsibility to report the news "fairly and accurately". The Western media's constant harping about the lack of freedom in Singapore is baseless, our ministers insist.
Yet, when one goes out to poll 1,011 people here about whether our media are indeed free, Singaporeans give answers that are consistent with what the Western media says, not what the government says. Funny that.
© Yawning Bread -
Singapore press freedom (in terms of politics) is equivalent to that of North Korea.
We have one man or one family like the Authoritarian regime of North Korea, dictating what we should or should not do. Most of their leader's propaganda are spread through the media to EDUCATE the masses. -
Just compare what is reported on the TV and what is PRINTED on the 1st page of the 154th times after the 1st day of taxi fare increase.
TV - waiting time in CBD is worse.
Paper - No waiting time for getting taxi in CBD.
Another case is the $800 seat at Terminal 3.
See how the press "massaged" the truth the next day.
Now, even the letter to press forum are being "edited" as highlighted in another internet forum. -
And they like to insult Singaporean's intelligence with low grade propaganda by comparing taxi fare with countries like London, and conveniently omitting the fall in the prices of COE in their analysis.
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"Do you want press freedom ? or Economic stability ?"
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These two are not necessarily opposing choices.Originally posted by Trump_Card:"Do you want press freedom ? or Economic stability ?" -
I know ...Originally posted by kilua:These two are not necessarily opposing choices.
I just remember a minister posing this question (can't remember when)
ps. correct me if I'm wrong -
Just compare what is reported on the TV and what is PRINTED on the 1st page of the 154th times after the 1st day of taxi fare increase.
I don't know much about these reports since I seldom watch news on TV or read the print media in Singapore.
There is no reason to do so."Do you want press freedom ? or Economic stability ?"
I would like both please. -
we have none of them.
sin city press control and edited by the poodles.
we have economic shameless inflation induced by out of this world shameless million paid poodles.
now, every business can increase price anyhow without reason.
just like a mineral water rise from $7 to $9. -
I think the average worker would have at least 3-5 times more wages than an average Singaporean worker.Originally posted by kilua:And they like to insult Singaporean's intelligence with low grade propaganda by comparing taxi fare with countries like London, and conveniently omitting the fall in the prices of COE in their analysis. -
Press freedom and economic stability are not mutually exclusive events.
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Exactly ! Many countries have both press freedom and economic stability.Originally posted by maurizio13:Press freedom and economic stability are not mutually exclusive events. -
What???Originally posted by googoomuck:Exactly ! Many countries have both press freedom and economic stability.
NOoOooOo.
Surely, you jest. -
This is basically old news. And yeah Singapore has never had an era of press freedom
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"Despite the fact" was used to make the article look good.
Other than that, there's no lie in that statement.
The statement is a fact.
Singapore journalists don't lie, but they have good writing skills. That's the reason why you often have to read harder... nothing is to be ever taken literally. -
I wouldn't say they have good writing skills but they sure can 'dress up' a storyOriginally posted by ndmmxiaomayi:"
Singapore journalists don't lie, but they have good writing skills. -
“It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.”
-Paul Joseph Goebbels, Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda
"Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist."
– Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell, Propaganda And Persuasion
"Education is valuable, commendable, enlightening, instructive. Propaganda is insidious, dishonest, underhanded, misleading."
- Public relations pioneer Edward L. Bernays
With so many 'happenings' in Singapore, the least they will do is to loosen up media control. -
The other casualty of the Great Escape: mainstream media credibility
by
Cherian George
March 2nd, 2008Anyone 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.
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, 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
1. AcidFlask says that the above article is too charitable in letting government off the hook.
2. 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.
http://journalism.sg/2008/03/02/the-other-casualty-of-the-great-escape-mainstream-media-credibility/