December 1, 2009 by admin
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By Ben Bland for Index on Censorship
When Reporters without Borders released its annual press freedom
index last month, the Singapore government was not best pleased to
find the city-state ranked 133rd out of 175 countries, below the
likes of Kenya and Congo.
Singapore’s law minister, K Shanmugam, dismissed the low ranking
as “quite absurd and divorced from reality”, insisting to a group
of visiting American lawyers that Singapore is not “a repressive
state” and does not “unfairly target the press”.
“Our approach on press reporting is simple: The press can
criticise us, our policies. We do not seek to condemn that,” he
said.
While reading his comments in the state-controlled Straits Times
newspaper, I was busy packing my suitcase as I’d recently found out
that I had become “the latest on a long list of foreign journalists
who have been targeted by the government for their news coverage”,
in the words of the Committee to Protect Journalists.
After a year as a freelance journalist in Singapore,
contributing to publications such as The Economist, the Daily
Telegraph and the British Medical Journal, my application to renew
my work visa was rejected without warning, explanation or right of
appeal.
The law minister’s comments might have appeared hypocritical to
most people but if I had written as much while still in Singapore,
I would have landed myself with a ruinous defamation suit.
As well as forcing out foreign correspondents, destroying the
careers of local journalists and maintaining ownership over all the
domestic newspapers and news broadcasters, the Singapore government
is fond of using its stringent libel laws to further restrict the
freedom of the press.
Two weeks ago, the soon-to-close Far Eastern Economic Review was
forced to pay S$405,000 (£177,000) in damages and costs to the
prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, and his father, Singapore’s
founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, after being found guilty of defaming
the Lees in a 2006 article based on an interview with Chee Soon
Juan, an opposition politician.
Rupert Murdoch’s Dow Jones, which owns the publication, denied
any wrongdoing but said it was paying up to avoid a protracted
legal battle.
Dow Jones, which has chosen to locate the Southeast Asian
headquarters of its newswire division in the tightly-controlled
city-state, said that the ruling would not deter it from its core
mission “to provide fair and timely reporting and commentary on
matters of importance from around the world, including in
Singapore”.
However, most working journalists in Singapore agree that the
government’s persistent use of libel suits against global news
organisations such as The Economist, the International Herald
Tribune, the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg has had a chilling
effect on press freedom.
Such a heavy-handed approach may mean that the government loses
the battle in the short term, coming under fire for showing such
intolerance toward mild criticism from reputable publications.
However, the government has won the war because international
news organisations have, by and large, been silenced by the threat
of having to pay substantial damages or having their access to the
lucrative Singapore market curtailed.
Stories that quote an opposition politician or civil society
expert are few and far between, while hard-hitting investigative
journalism is virtually non-existent.
The real victims of this repression are not foreign
correspondents like myself, who can re-locate, or large news
organisations such as Dow Jones, which can afford to bear the costs
of an occasional libel suit, but Singaporeans.
For the inevitable result of the government’s regular attacks on
the foreign press and its exercise of direct control over the
domestic media is that a corrosive atmosphere of self-censorship is
all-pervasive.
In researching this story, I spoke to many Singaporean and
foreign journalists, trying to find someone who had a more positive
view of the government’s approach to the press. But even those who
support some of the government’s restrictions were not willing to
comment on the record for fear of somehow upsetting the
powers-that-be and jeopardising their livelihood.
Although I wrote about some sensitive topics in Singapore such
as rising crime and the challenges of an ageing population, I
always believed that I was operating within the bounds of what was
acceptable.
However, the ruling People’s Action Party, which has maintained
a vice-like grip on power since independence from Britain in 1959,
deliberately refuses to clarify what journalists can and cannot
write about.
By keeping the boundaries of what is permissible opaque, the
government ensures that most journalists and other commentators err
on the side of caution — especially Singaporeans, who have much
more to lose than their foreign counterparts if they fall foul of
the authorities.
This self-censorship is, in the words of Milos Forman, the Czech
film director who lived under the yoke of the Nazis and the
Communists, “the worst evil…because that twists spines, that
destroys my character because I have to think something else and
say something else, I have to always control myself.” – Index on
Censorship
Republished from Index on Censorship on 30 November
2009
Ben Bland is a freelance journalist. He was based in Singapore
between October 2008 and October 2009. He blogs at http://www.asiancorrespondent.com/the-asia-file