by
Anyone 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/
