This is exacerbated by the fact that we only have 1 English-language broadsheet in this country. There is no serious rival outlet to redress the media imbalance.

What do the opposition think of this recommendation?

We don’t know, and Hussain didn’t bother to find out.

The line, I think is a fine one. If he had made this suggestion anywhere outside of Petir, my sense is that you would have had less problem with its prominence.

Making a change to an education policy that captures all schools is a national policy. The writer is a minister.

The platform he chose to make the suggestion is party political. To me, that doesn’t immediately override the first two points.

But hey, I can see your line of reasoning and it is not without reason.
I don’t necessarily agree but I’ll leave it at that.

If the Law Minister was speaking on matters of national policy, then you are right. But in this case, he wasn’t.

It was a party political piece, written from his competence as a top member of the PAP, targeted at PAP members, given the publication it was printed in was a PAP magazine. He did not write in in his competence as a cabinet minister.

In this vein, the press would logically accord importance to his speeches made as Law Minister speaking on govt policy, legal matters, national matters. But in this case, he wasn’t.

In Singapore, unfortunately, many people have bought completely into the idea that PAP = govt and govt = PAP, and the lines between the two have been blurred. This is a party political news coverage, not government coverage. If ST wishes to cover party political news in this manner, it should do so for all political parties.

But if I am reading you right. In your view, if a member of the opposition, say Mr Low Thia Khiang, were to make the suggestion, it should be accorded the same importance as if the Law Minsiter did. I have to disagree.

“I do not know if the ST readership at large is more like me or like you, but I was interested in what Shanmugam had to say.”

I wrote in my column that one of the problems with the ST in doing stories like this is that it seldom does the same coverage for opposition party publications or statements. If this sort of piece is what ST considers news, then it should be covering the same material that comes out from opposition parties.

“Is a personal attack necessary if your stated intention is to simply encourage debate on the quality of the press? It comes off as someone with some sort of personal agenda. Did he piss you off when you interned there?”

I have never met him actually.

My point was to show that he is clearly capable of doing better than what he did in this story – he is certainly well-trained, and his experience at Columbia would have exposed him to the way political journalism is done elsewhere, for all its positives and negatives.

His Petir story is not journalism, and it only just about can be described as reporting (there’s a difference between the two) – it is basically a paraphrased Petir press release. Its cut-and-paste-and-rearrange nature means it certainly won’t see the light of day on these Columbia University Journalism School student-run news websites (http://www.journalism.columbia.edu/cs/ContentServer/jrn/1212610920459/page/1175295367452/JRNSimplePage2.htm) even if they were covering Singaporean politics.

Further on this note, the influx of PR influence in the news media and their growing ability to set the news agenda will something I will write about in the future.

As I have explained in the column, this story could be so much better written, more fully-fleshed out, put into context vis-a-vis the wider political scene. But it wasn’t.

I would therefore argue that he knowingly compromised on journalistic quality in his writing of this piece. He was capable of doing better, but he did not. Perhaps not out of choice, but nonetheless the product is not satisfactory.

If I have an agenda, I would say it is an agenda against institutional and systemic bias in the press. Hussain’s piece on Shanmugam’s Petir editorial, both seen by itself and when judged in the context of overall ST political coverage, is an example of such bias.

I do not know if the ST readership at large is more like me or like you, but I was interested in what Shanmugam had to say. I happen to agree that there needs to be more political education in schools and to find out that the Government is interested in introducing it is news to me.

I don’t receive Petir, so I wouldn’t have found out if not for ST. And as I said, it was news to me, and I’m glad it was news to ST also and not a review column. Just because something is announced in a op-ed in Petir to me doesn’t immediately rule it out as news.

Granted, I do not know if I am representative of the ST readership or not. I assume the people in ST with experience know their readers best.

But this disagreement with the basic premise of your critique is, as far as I’m concerned, an aside.

If you had simply voiced your opinion that the piece was not newsworthy, I would have never ventured to suggest that you have a superiority complex.

It’s the grandstanding and posturing you add to your writing that leaves me with a bad taste in the mouth.
“It seems that Zakir Hussain continues to flatter to deceive in his role as political correspondent. In the 19 December issue, the Oxford-educated and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism-trained reporter ditched his years of training and became no more than a parrot.”

Is a personal attack necessary if your stated intention is to simply encourage debate on the quality of the press? It comes off as someone with some sort of personal agenda. Did he piss you off when you interned there?

That you choose ALSO to do it under the veil of anonymity is definitely a telling thing.

~~~~~~~~~~~

It is easy to tell others, but now, when you are in the hot seat, do you really have what you say it takes? Please share your full name, address, educational and working qualifications, since you say that these are requried before the author can criticise the MSM.

Without this information, we can safely chuck your comment in the dustbin since it is a clear case of double standards.

26) saiber on January 4th, 2010 2.22 pm

Thus far, you position yourself as someone who has a better news sense than the msm and are more adept at doing the job of reporting. Granted you have little or no actual experience working as a reporter, I don’t see how you can assume you know better without the presence of at least a mild god complex.

That you choose to do it under the veil of anonymity is another curious thing.

“Thus far, you position yourself as someone who has a better news sense than the msm and are more adept at doing the job of reporting. Granted you have little or no actual experience working as a reporter, I don’t see how you can assume you know better without the presence of at least a mild god complex.”

I am not sure how you came to assume that I have no journalistic experience. It would suffice for me to say that I do have journalistic experience as writer and editor. Regardless, I see this as irrelevant.

My critique will stand or fall on its merits and failings. I think I have explained in reasonably clear terms what the problems in the news stories I picked out were and why I think they are problematic. If my arguments are sound, they will withstand scrutiny and advance debate on the media. If they are not, all readers (including yourself) are welcome and in fact encouraged to tear it apart.

In the vein of your argument, you may ask what have journalists to offer in discussing politics, education, economics, sport, etc when so many of them are not experienced professionals in those fields. Yet nonetheless, many journalists themselves discuss such issues, which they have no direct involvement in, and do so intelligently, providing useful insight and fostering debate (although there are also those who do not). If they make sound arguments, no one minds or even notices that they are not trained experts in the fields they write about. But if they are mere pretenders, others would come in to correct them.

It shouldn’t matter if I am utterly uninitiated or an old-hand in the business. I am not discussing issues that are privy to a select few and can only be tackled by very learned or skilled exponents. The stuff I have discussed concern a public product which has public consequences. So even if I am not a journalist, I would as a member of public have a direct stake in the output of journalists, for it concerns and affects me and the society I live in. I would have a stake, as a reader of their work, in the quality of their journalism. I would have as much as right as any other to criticise their work when I see failings in them.

I don’t see myself as necessarily being better than those whose work I criticise. I would definitely say however that I know that they can do better than this, and for the sake of their readers they should.

“That you choose to do it under the veil of anonymity is another curious thing.”

Curious it is, and I understand my use of a handle will come across as duplicitous too. Nonetheless, it shouldn’t have any bearing on the merit and failings of my column.

Rather, I follow on from the spirit of online forums and article comments on the likes of the Guardian website – anonymity, use of handles, avatars and pseudonyms, doesn’t stop people from having fruitful debate and commentary on the articles and topics in question.

In fact, I would even argue that this to some extent forces users to focus on the issues, rather than be distracted by fancy credentials. I think people sometimes defer too much to credentials and become passive when reading commentary.

If I may raise the example of Zakir Hussain again; his credentials are quite impressive and would clearly indicate that he was well-trained in the journalistic craft. But either out of circumstance (adherence to the Straits Times editorial stance) or personal volition, he produced a very inadequate article on Shanmugam’s Petir editorial.

Perhaps you may disagree with me on my judgement of this particular story by Hussain, or any of my criticism in this column or earlier ones. If so, please raise your concerns. This would be the sort of discussion I want to have here, instead of belabouring the points of whether or not I am an narcissitic egomaniac, or if I am “experienced” enough to dissect the news.

If I am indeed a fraud and don’t know what I am talking about, it shouldn’t be hard to expose me. If you think I am wrong, tell me and argue your from your perspective. This will lead to a far more fruitful discussion than this. And I want to have that discussion, for it can only improve our understanding and awareness about the issues concerning the Singaporean news media.

That you choose to do it under the veil of anonymity is another curious thing.

That you choose to do it under the veil of anonymity is another curious thing.

If official media in Singapore is becoming a mere echo chamber, a Tass-style official alternative to reality to which nobody with any sense gives real credibility, then what effect on the city? The Minister or his close cronies authorize a particular item of propaganda floating a “wondrous” new policy, hear no push-back at all from the public (which is either too cowed to complain or studiously ignoring the official “information” channel)… and disaster ensues. It’s not like it hasn’t happened before… but one of the main virtues of a free and open media community is that it can protect the government from itself. Look at China – hardly a democratic state, but orders of magnitude more responsive to public opinion than our local pooh-bahs. Can we afford to let this go on while another million Singaporeans emigrate to freer, better climes?

I would suggest that because of the nature of our society, and the way voting is conducted (“because it is profit driven”) is not conducive for us to continue with such a contest. If conincidently next year a person from the same race is selected as a Winner, than it would more strongly strengthen the feelings of the critics. We talk about being unique, why then are we copying contests that are created in other countries?

What is a Singapore Idol? What does it really means and take to be a Singapore Idol? Look into the depth for the meaning of the word Idol? Does it really mean that you are an excellent singer and it makes you to be a Singapore Idol?

I think we should scrape this whole contest before it creates more controversy and creates a visible crack in our society than good.

Perhaps a contest to discover new talents or something with a mult-racial flavor like multi racial dress/song/look/dance etc, could be created in Singpaore which we can be called uniquely Singapore.

The point of this column is an attempt at plurality.

Thanks to the Newspaper and Printing Presses Act, there is no genuine plurality in the Singaporean press. There may be 16 newspapers in circulation, but when that is broken down, the plurality is almost non-existent – few of the papers are in direct competition with one another).

Just looking at English-language newspapers, there is one English-language daily broadsheet (Straits Times), one English-language weekly broadsheet (Sunday Times), one English-language business/financial paper (Business Times), one English-language daily tabloid (The New Paper), one English-language weekly tabloid (TNP Sunday), and three freesheets (Today, Weekend Today and My Paper). The only genuine competition going on is between Today and My Paper. The other papers have their own target readership, and no one else in the print market to challenge them.

Further to this, there is no concerted civil society effort directed specifically at discussing and addressing media issues. We haven’t the likes of, just to name a few:
Regret the Error – a list of apologies and corrections made by newspapers in the US and UK – http://www.regrettheerror.com
MediaGuardian – a section of the Guardian devoted to reporting and commentary of media news and issues – http://www.guardian.co.uk/media
Media Standards Trust – an independent charity aiming to foster media transparency and accountability – http://www.mediastandardstrust.org
The Daily Show – satirical show that often critiques the US news media – http://www.thedailyshow.com
Journalisted – a database of UK journalists and catalogue of their published work, which helps improve transparency – http://www.journalisted.com

The Singaporean press is not openly self-reflective, given the absence of any discourse and debate over the media (although all newspapers certainly review and critique themselves). But the media and its activities fall firmly within the public sphere and therefore constitutes a public issue.

I don’t pretend or profess to be Harold Evans, Bob Woodward or David Halberstam. But the press is public, and anyone and in fact everyone is entitled to criticise or engage in discussion about them. This discourse is not really happening here, and the least I can hope to do, is to give the process a pin-prick. Maybe others will catch on.

So no surprises here.

I stand corrected.

‘the reader’ was my family member who is a bit , i suspect, senile. I read the chinese MSM newspaper Myself this morning and realise that the diplomat’s name and position was mentioned. So, i appologise for the misunderstood information i posted earlier. The MSM did report all the info. only pictures of him and his friends were not published.

i mean, you don’t make claims based on what several peeps say, d’you?