THE TEMASEK REVIEW

By Eugene Yeo

It is an occasion of double joy for SPH today. A new corporate logo was unveiled in conjunction with its 25th anniversary celebrations.

I can’t help wondering how much the re-design of the same name cost the shareholders which brought up to mind the $400,000 of taxpayers’ monies spent by Mah Bow Tan to rename ‘Marina Bay’ back to its original moniker in 2005 (read news report here)

The event was hosted by ex-DPM Tony Tan in presence of the President S R Nathan and PAP ministers Dr Lee Boon Yang and Mr Lui Tuck Yew.

A beaming S R Nathan recalled his experience  during his stint with SPH:

‘When I accepted the job of heading Straits Times Press,…… the then Prime Minister, Mr Lee Kuan Yew, told me: ‘Nathan, I’m giving you The Straits Times. It has something like 150 years of history. It is like a bowl of china. You break it, I can piece it together again, but it will never be the same. Try not to. I am proud to say that the bowl that was handed to me and passed on to successor leaders of SPH remains unbroken - in fact it has achieved a better glow with successive years. ‘ (read full article here)

Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels would be proud of Lee Kuan Yew if he is alive. Nazi propaganda lasted no more than a decade. The PAP myth is going into its 50th anniversary and still going strong.

How can the ‘bowl’ of SPH be broken when it enjoys a 100% monopoly and is owned 100% by the government? Other than North Korea, China and Myanmar, I cannot think of any other country where its print media is completely under the thumb of the government.

SPH was formed on Aug 4, 1984 through a merger of three organisations – the Straits Times Press group, the Singapore News and Publications Limited and Times Publishing Berhad which was later de-merged from SPH in 1988. The merger brought together the English, Malay and Chinese newspapers under one roof. SPH later also bought Tamil Murasu Pte Ltd. (read article here)

1984 marked the official demise of a free and independent press in Singapore though the nail was hit into its coffin way back in 1975 with the introduction of the Newspaper and Printing Act to control the ownership of news printing firms.

SPH has indeed served its master well by churning out daily doses of state propaganda to justify the PAP’s many flawed policies and repressive measures to stifle civil society and the opposition.

Unfortunately, its “success” has become a tragedy for many Singaporeans who were brought up believing every single word published by the print media to hold it as the gospel truth while it is nothing more than just plain propaganda to serve the narrow partisan interests of the PAP.

25 years of state-sanctioned indoctrination has created an unthinking, subservient and apathetic citizenry who is contented to leave the running of the country entirely to the government without asking questions.

Few people from my generation actually bother to read up on current affairs, let alone spot the glaring inconsistencies and inaccuracies in the media reports and to challenge the nonsense spewed out from the mouths of our highly paid self acclaimed “talented” PAP leaders.

This is what 25 years of relentless PAP propaganda dispensed through its propaganda mouthpiece has done to our minds. And that is why the PAP is unable to recruit first rate talents into the government and has to content itself with paying obscence salaries to keep second rate talents within its ranks.

In a country where the boundaries between the state and the party are blurred, what works for the party often has disastrous consequences for the state.

To the PAP, having the media under its absolute control is a necessity for them to ride roughshod over a politically naive electorate so as to force unpalatable policies down our throat again, again and again.

Over the years, our basic human rights have been raped repeatedly without any protests. Foreigners are allowed to stampede all over the locals to steal their rice bowls with impunity; GST was raised to 3, 5 and then 7% to “help the poor”. New HDB flats are pegged to the value of resale flats when it is supposedly to be a low cost affordable public housing. CPF withdrawal limits are raised from 55 to 62 and in time to come, perhaps 85. PAP ministers lavished themselves with exorbitant salaries when our income gap between the poor and the rich is one of the highest amongst first world economies. A significant chunk of our reserves accumulated over the years were lost in less than a year and still nobody is held accountable. These are just a few of the many instances where the PAP has taken us for granted without having to pay any political price.

In other developed Asian countries like Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea, their media will rise up in arms to serve as the voice of the people to protest against the government. Here in Singapore, the mainstream media is an accomplice to the PAP to preserve its political hegemony.

David Marshall is indeed spot on in calling the Straits Times journalists “poor prostitutes and running dogs of the PAP”. Not all the SPH journalists are to blame. Some genuinely have a conscience and committment to their professional ethics, but they have little room to manoeuvre when the senior editors are all henchmen of the PAP. Not surprisingly, a few SPH editors were “promoted” to PAP MPs after years of “dedicated service” to the party, Seng Han Thong and Irene Ng being cases in point.

Without a free and independent press to act as an 4th pillar of the state, Singapore’s future is very grim. We have little choice but to swim or sink with the PAP. If they sink, we will go down together with them because there is nobody else outside the system who can replace them.

SPH is the biggest stumbling block to the emergence of a credible alternative party in Singapore to check on the PAP. In almost every general elections, the SPH spin doctors were called upon to demolish the opposition when they should be focusing on critical issues of national importance.

In 2006, we saw how the media conducted a 7 day smear campaign against Workers’ Party candidate James Gomez for a trivial mistake. In 2001, it was Dr Chee Soon Juan. In 1997, it was Tang Liang Hong who was demonized as a Chinese chauvinist and in 1991, Jufrie Mahmood was attacked unfairly as a Malay chauvinist.

SPH’s timely interference had made that extra difference in saving the skin of the the PAP in closely contested constituencies. Jufrie Mahmood won 49.1% of the valid votes in Eunos GRC while JBJ and Tang won 45.3% in Cheng San GRC.

What if Singaporeans have voted 5 opposition MPs into Parliament in 1997? Will we continue to be subjugated by the PAP in our very own land of birth? Can we not find out the answers to the amount of reserves we have now? That is why the PAP doesn’t want to have “real” opposition in Parliament to make them accountable to the people and this is why SPH needs to be chaired by an ex-PAP minister to this very day.

While SPH and the PAP celebrates 25 years of overwhelming success in state-sponsored thought control, let us, as one of the few who have managed to escape relatively unscathed from its omnipresent influence, mourn the demise of a free and independent press.

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