Shoddy Journalism

During a Q&A exchange of the ''Leadership Renewal The Fourth Generation and Beyond" Kent Ridge Ministerial Forum at NUS in April 2007, a second year sociology major was trying to complete his question, "... we are doing absolutely badly and this is exacerbated by the fact that although Singapore is a First World country, it has a Third World wage structure - and this is according to the Straits Times, not from anywhere else. And even Professor Tommy Koh ..."
PM Lee cut him off with : "Do you believe everything you read in the Straits Times?"

Low Thia Khiang has made it clear he doesn't, but he's probably more upset about the political innocents who might be mortified by misleading headlines or picture captions. After all, Francis Seow's book "The Media Enthralled: Singapore Revisited" is not easily available at the book shelves here.

The newspaper that was once ranked 154th out of 195 in the "2007 Freedom of the Press World Ranking" by "Freedom House" is crying foul. Never mind if a United States diplomatic cable leaked by WikiLeaks once quoted Chua Chin Hon, the Straits Times' U.S. bureau chief, saying that the paper's "editors have all been groomed as pro-government supporters and are careful to ensure that reporting of local events adheres closely to the official line", and that "the government exerts significant pressure on ST editors to ensure that published articles follow the government's line".

Thanks to the exchange of letters in the Forum page we now know that the Secret Squirrel was in direct email communication with the Straits Times, and not any other publication. We also know that they chose the date of publication, which opens up another can of worms - was the timing intended to inflict maximum collateral damage? Low said in the post election conference his party did not have the resources to investigate the matter, but SPH has. All they need to do is to check the mail header, and lots of interesting things can be found, such as the source of posting. If the Tin Pei Ling example is anything to go by, even the law enforcement folks may not have the political will to complete the detective work. Last time we checked, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein do not work in the shitty times.