Mar 11, 2010

6.5% growth expected this year

Economists raise rate and see bigger jump in exports, manufacturing

A friend once told me that our media is being used as a public propaganda tool to spread goodwill message within the population.  He is saying that the government used the public media as its mouthpiece to publicise whatever message it wants to send to the people depending on the current economic  or political situation. For example, if the current sentiment of the population is negative i.e.  they are unhappy with some of the prevailing government policies, the media will try to portray the government as a caring one sending out  many  positive messages to try and influence the population.

It is not unlike the times of Adolf Hitler, the past Nazi German leader who used the media to his advantage as he was a great orator and publicist. He could literally persuade millions of German people to believe in his plan to conquer the world and killed millions of innocent people. You could say that the Germans were a naive lot then but it worked for Hitler.

I didn’t believe that our media can be influenced as I always thought “How can this happened in a modern democratic country like ours?” If you tell me that this is happening in China or North Korea,  I will believe  you,  but in a First World country like  Singapore?

It is also no wonder that our alternative online blogsites have recently took off in greater measure than before. Online reporting from Temasek Review and The Online Citizen have received huge increase in readership as they provide a realistic on-the-ground voice that the official media could not provide. Our media also did not receive good rating from international media poll which gave us a a very poor rating on freedom of press category.

Some  friends have also told me that the newspaper senior reporting team is being staffed by the Internal Security Department.  Again, there is no proof to this and I can only deem it as a rumour unless I know someone who can testify to this as a fact.

Out of curiosity, I went to do a one-week quite scan of our national newspaper  The Straits Times and the online Channelnewsasia  website and came out feeling shocked and disturbed.  There were more than at least ten feel-good messages there and some of them were down right politically-motivated.

Also equally disturbing is the open respect journalist gave to our government. A certain senior writer, Ms Chua Mui Hoong, wrote a piece on 12 Mar entitled “No wayang – MPs serve as a early warning system”. The article unshamedly praised the government’s MPs for bringing up relevant issues for debate in Parliament and perhaps may have broke the jounalistic cardinal sin of not staying neutral in what she reports. Journlias, I feel, should just report news and naot provide their own opinion on what is good or bad. They should have left that to the reader. Moreover, one can hardly feel any reporter writing a piece that criticizes the government. To me, thats the paper main fault – doing biased reporting.

If you go through the online newspapers of most major developed countries,  you can hardly find them praising the government openly or fill them up with positive feel-good articles. There will usually be  a combination of both negative and positive articles and most are in fact neutral pieces. No major newspapers want to be branded as pro-government or worse still to be seen as controlled and used as a mouthpiece to spread propaganda. For the government.

I have loosely tabulated the headlines of some of the feel-good messages  posted  by the Straits Times and Channelnewsasia – both belonged to  Singapore Press Holdings.  Note that I only did a one-week quick search only.  I can only shudder if i do a longer more thorough search… 

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