We Are What We Read?
I was flipping through the Shin Min Daily News the other day and the news reports were worthy of any tabloid in the world. The front page was dominated by an alleged sex scandal in Taiwan, with an alluring picture of the victim and a forlorn looking old man accused of raping her plastered next to the headline. Inside the paper, a news story told of how a woman had thrown herself down her HDB block, committing suicide, after a tumultuous period in her life which included being spurned by her lover. The headline continued to inform that sorrowful wailings can be heard from that block. Bizarre? You bet.
If you think that I’m being too graphic with my description of the juicy stories carried by this local Chinese tabloid, please do note that I was merely regurgitating what I saw in the paper. And if we’re tempted to think that such newspapers in Mother Tongue pander to an older generation of readers who are not well educated and with a less sophisticated reading taste, The New Paper is an English language tabloid that carries stories just as sordid as the above examples.
I guess that my point is there is definitely a market for such sensational news in Singapore. Clearly, we do not subscribe to the theory of Asian values of harmony and community when it comes to the consumption of news. Not when we lap up stories about other peoples’ misery and when sex sells so well.
Why is it then, that when it comes to explaining the local press being supposedly respectful of authority, the government likes to invoke the mystical argument of Asian values? Is it true that being Asian, we are innately programmed to respect authority and expect others to do the same as well?
Our appetite for less than savoury stories in our tabloids have already shown that using Asian values to explain how our press works is at best a weak argument, and at worst a very misleading way of looking at the local press system. Since the Asian values of harmony and community do not apply in the local press, I’m guessing that proclaiming that Singapore’s press is respectful of authority because of Asian values glosses over the underlying reasons that can better explain what we are observing in the local press.
As for the underlying reasons, who else but the First Prime Minister of Singapore can state it better?
“Freedom of the press, freedom of the news media, must be subordinated to the overriding needs of Singapore, and to the primacy of purpose of an elected government.” – Lee Kuan Yew 1971
Of course, the assumption is that the elected government will always be benign and that it will always exercise its powers correctly. The watchdog role of the press is suppressed in favour of a nation building one. Far be it for me to question if it was the right move back then, but 35 years after this quote, have the “overriding needs of Singapore” changed? The government doesn’t seem to think so, but more importantly, what do you as a Singaporean think?
If you think that I’m being too graphic with my description of the juicy stories carried by this local Chinese tabloid, please do note that I was merely regurgitating what I saw in the paper. And if we’re tempted to think that such newspapers in Mother Tongue pander to an older generation of readers who are not well educated and with a less sophisticated reading taste, The New Paper is an English language tabloid that carries stories just as sordid as the above examples.
I guess that my point is there is definitely a market for such sensational news in Singapore. Clearly, we do not subscribe to the theory of Asian values of harmony and community when it comes to the consumption of news. Not when we lap up stories about other peoples’ misery and when sex sells so well.
Why is it then, that when it comes to explaining the local press being supposedly respectful of authority, the government likes to invoke the mystical argument of Asian values? Is it true that being Asian, we are innately programmed to respect authority and expect others to do the same as well?
Our appetite for less than savoury stories in our tabloids have already shown that using Asian values to explain how our press works is at best a weak argument, and at worst a very misleading way of looking at the local press system. Since the Asian values of harmony and community do not apply in the local press, I’m guessing that proclaiming that Singapore’s press is respectful of authority because of Asian values glosses over the underlying reasons that can better explain what we are observing in the local press.
As for the underlying reasons, who else but the First Prime Minister of Singapore can state it better?
“Freedom of the press, freedom of the news media, must be subordinated to the overriding needs of Singapore, and to the primacy of purpose of an elected government.” – Lee Kuan Yew 1971
Of course, the assumption is that the elected government will always be benign and that it will always exercise its powers correctly. The watchdog role of the press is suppressed in favour of a nation building one. Far be it for me to question if it was the right move back then, but 35 years after this quote, have the “overriding needs of Singapore” changed? The government doesn’t seem to think so, but more importantly, what do you as a Singaporean think?
posted by Eagle Eye at 8:47 AM
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