NTU censors campus news coverage of Chee Soon Juan
visit
Terence Lee / Youth
Editor
Dr
Chee Soon Juan created a whirlwind when he paid a surprise visit to
NTU, but left behind only a whimper as the university censored all
campus news coverage of his arrival.
The latest
issue of NTU’s campus newspaper, The Nanyang
Chronicle , was published on Monday (15th
September), and was slated to feature an article about Dr Chee’s
visit. In the end, it featured only a visit of a different sort –
that of the former President of India, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam, who is a
stranger among Singaporean students.
On
26th August, the controversial opposition figure,
together with several other Singapore Democratic Party (SDP)
leaders, visited NTU to distribute flyers and interact with the
students. The NTU visit was part of a tour by the SDP to “raise
political awareness,” and it included NIE, SMU and NUS as well. The
NUS visit, which happened on 11th September, was covered
by the university’s student-run online newspaper, The Campus Observer .
Student
journalists from the Chronicle and NTU’s student-run news magazine
programme, Nanyang Spectrum , were quick to converge on Dr Chee
and the SDP members to conduct interviews.
Mr Philip
Lim, 23, head of Nanyang Spectrum, was in-charge of producing the
news clip for Dr Chee’s visit. Equipped with a video camera, he was
on-site to document his visit, but he had trouble finding students
to interview.
“This has
never occurred to me before, even after many months on Spectrum. I
suspect it’s due to the sensitivity of the topic,” he
said.
He also
recalled how some students whom he spoke to did not know who Dr
Chee was. “Someone even asked me if he was the national table
tennis coach who just got sacked!” he added. The question, in
fact, is a misnomer; the coach in question, Mr Liu Guodong, is in
talks to renew his contract with the Singapore Table Tennis
Association to help prepare the national team for the 2012 London
Olympics.
However, any
excitement that their news items would appear on print or screen
died down quickly. Mr Lim recalled how he had to remove two out of
the three soundbites he planned to use, after some advice from his
professors. Further edits were made thereafter, until he felt it
was “neutral enough already.”
Despite these
measures, the episode was shown for less than three days before the
university’s corporate communications department ordered the
episode to be taken off-the-air for good.
The
article slated for the Nanyang Chronicle was also axed.
(Picture, left: The in-house advertisement that was created to
replace the Chee Soon Juan story.) After much negotiation
between the paper’s teacher-advisors and the university, NTU
president Su Guaning gave the article the go-ahead. However, he
changed his mind at the last minute, and the article was removed
just one day before the newspaper’s publication on Monday
(15th September). Many of the student editors at the
Chronicle were clearly indignant when they learnt about
this.
One of them,
3rd year communications studies student Cheryl Ong, 21 —
who is also the Chronicle’s news editor — wrote on her blog:
“The reason given for the censorship
left a bad taste in my mouth. I can’t really talk about what my
teacher told us, because it was mostly his conjecture—’They’ have
yet to tell us the official reason.”
She also
wrote how “a number of journalism students were rather disgruntled”
when the incident transpired.
Chief editor
Lin Junjie, 23, said that while they “do not necessarily agree with
all executive decisions made by the owner or the publisher”, their
journalists have “done their best” to cover every story, including
the one that was censored.
“The
situation wasn’t within our control as we’re funded by them,” he
said.
According to
Associate Professor Benjamin Detenber, Chair of NTU’s Wee Kim Wee
School of Communication and Information (WKWSCI), which runs both
campus media, the university’s position is that the story was
killed because “there was a feeling of concern over the use of
student media to publicise and promote the unsolicited views of an
uninvited person to the campus.”
But
22-year-old NTU student Naresh Ethan Subhash, who is currently
studying film, remained highly critical. He said: “I’m really
frustrated. Being university students, we are people who can think
for ourselves. If they want to create an institution of higher
education, censoring the campus media is totally
unacceptable.”
However, Mr
Sng Weiliang, a 22 year-old business student, offered another
perspective: “I guess they feel that younger people tend to be more
myopic, that’s why they want to prevent us from being
influenced.”
Literature
student Elaine Lee, 20, felt that the censorship questions the
student’s analytical ability.
“If we aren’t
exposed to anything, how can we be expected to gauge one political
view from another?” she added.
http://theonlinecitizen.com/2008/09/ntu-censors-campus-ne