One sentence stuck in my mind from journalist Ben Bland's article in the Guardian after his working visa was not renewed by the Singapore government.
In the article, Ejected from Singapore, he wrote:
One senior editor at a major international newspaper in Asia admitted that he line-edits every single story about Singapore for fear of upsetting the powers-that-be.
Maybe the editor has a longer memory than most of us.
For the Economist magazine got into trouble after cutting just one sentence from a letter written by the then Singapore High Commissioner in London, Abdul Aziz Mahmood, to fit in another letter by the opposition politician, JB Jeyaretnam.
Yes, that's what it says in a Columbia University Journalism School case study of Singapore and the media.
It looks at how Time got into trouble in 1986, the Asian Wall Street Journal in 1987, Asiaweek in 1987, the Far Eastern Economic Review in 1987, the International Herald Tribune in 1994, Bloomberg News in 2002 and the Far Eastern Economic Review again in 2006.
But the Economist case seems most interesting because it started with just one sentence being edited out of a letter. Editors had better be careful!
The case involved prominent figures: Patrick Daniel, who is now editor-in-chief of the English and Malay Newspapers Division of Singapore Press Holdings, and Tharman Shanmugaratnam, now the Finance Minister of Singapore.
Let me quote from the study:
The tangled case of the Economist’s brush with the law began with a June 1993 article called “Psst—wanna see a statistic?” The piece dealt with five journalists from the local Business Times who were being prosecuted by the Singapore government under the Official State Secrets Act for reporting on the government’s preliminary, or “flash” GDP estimates.
Patrick Daniel was then the editor of the Business Times, which had published the report after someone somehow saw a copy of the flash estimates kept by Tharman Shanmugaratnam. He was then director of the economics department of the Monetary Authority of Singapore, according to this book you can see on Google Books.
The Economist received letters after it wrote about the case. And that was the beginning of the trouble. The Columbia study says:
On July 10, 1993, the Economist published two letters in response to the piece: one from the country’s leading opposition politician, J.B. Jeyaretnam, and one from Singapore’s high commissioner in London, Abdul Aziz Mahmood. In order to make Mahmood’s letter fit, the editors of the Economist cut one sentence.
Two days after the July 10 issue came out, Mahmood wrote in again, protesting the cut and adding another paragraph in response to Jeyaretnam’s letter. He demanded that this latest letter be published in full. The Economist declined to publish it, which prompted the Ministry of Information to write to the magazine in support of Mahmood’s request, saying that the deleted sentence was a crucial one. If the Economist failed to remedy the situation in one of the two upcoming issues, the ministry said, the magazine would be gazetted for refusing the government its right of reply.
After some negotiation, Economist Editor Bill Emmott agreed to publish a new letter from Mahmood, one that would contain the omitted sentence and explain its significance, so that it would no longer be, in Emmott’s words, “obscure, misleading or distorting.” Instead, acting on instructions from the Ministry, Mahmood wrote two letters, one of which was a reply to Jeyaretnam’s letter. The Economist published just the first letter on July 31, and refused to publish two letters from the same person in one issue.
On August 2, the government announced it was gazetting the Economist, freezing its circulation at the current level of 7,500 copies. It also revoked the magazine’s exemption from the new rules for offshore newspapers. Now the Economist would be required to name a solicitor in Singapore and to post S$200,000 in case of any libel litigation. If the Economist did not print the letter, the ministry said, circulation would be reduced further.
“The government’s policy on its right of reply is well publicized and applies to all domestic and foreign journals which circulate in Singapore,” a ministry statement said.
Initially, the Economist balked at the demand…
But suddenly, on August 3, the Economist agreed to print the letter in its next issue, saying that this had always been its intention. In a statement explaining its decision, the Economist explained that it always sought “to obey the laws of countries in which we wish to publish.” That said, the Economist assured its audience that it would not allow readers to be “misled or somehow abused.” If ever its pages were to become “a propaganda sheet,” Emmott insisted, “we would choose to cease circulating in that jurisdiction.” The Economist remained gazetted and its circulation capped at 7,500.
The Columbia study also notes the achievements of Singapore. In a Brief History of Singapore, it says:
Lee’s policies were spectacularly successful. In a generation, Singapore transformed itself from a resourceless backwater to a major financial centre; by the 1980s, its per capita income was second in East Asia only to Japan’s.
It gives the Singapore government's views on society and the media --- and not just what the critics say.
