PAP’s new media blues (Part 3): How to engage and manage the Singapore new media

OPINION

In our previous article, we discuss the reasons why Singapore new media will never trigger a “political tsunami” in the next general elections. How should the government or ruling party deal with the new media then?

Minister of Information Communication and Arts Rear-Admiral Lui Tuck Yew said lately that though the mainstream media is still far ahead in terms of readership, the new media “is here to stay”.

Though it is impossible to control the internet, the new media can be managed and tamed to a certain degree if the right methods are employed.

The Singapore government should not repeat the same mistake made by its counterpart in Malaysia when it tried ways and means to silence prominent blogger Raja Petra Kamarrudin and turn him into a national hero while making itself look stupid at the same time.

The official response must always commensurate with the level of threat – one does not need to use a sledgehammer to kill a mosquito. You go straight to their breeding ground and eradicate their larvae.

The bottomline is: the action taken must not arouse international attention and condemnation which will tarnish Singapore’s image and damage its brand-name as a cosmopolitan city.

Right now, the government has chosen to turn a blind eye to the ramblings of cyberspace and send its agents to post comments on popular blogs like ours to defend the government.

Adopting such a passive approach will not help much in ameliorating the “wrong” perception of the government which is being promulgated in cyberspace.

The government should take the battle right to the doorsteps of Singapore’s blogosphere and fix the key players before they are allowed to create more “havoc” later on.

Let us play the Devils’ Advocate for once and put ourselves in the positions of MICA’s strategists.

Intelligence-gathering

The Sun-Tzu Art of War has a famous strategem – “Know yourself and your enemy and you will win a hundred battles easily”. Rear-Admiral Lui Tuck Yew seems to be aware of the two most prominent socio-political blogs in Singapore, but how much does he really know about them?

As we have elucidated earlier, the two blogs are run entirely by amateurs who receive little funding from external sources. They will need a large group of writers to contribute to keep their sites going.

The government can easily send one of its scholars or civil servants to “infiltrate” into these blogs to gather intelligence about their sugar-daddies (if any), motives and background of their writers.

For example, we had a security scare not too ago when a political blogger offered to join our team. It subsequently turned out that he was more interested in fishing for information about us and we terminated his services immediately.

Steeplejacking amateur sites

The Aware saga has provided us an important lesson on how organizations can be steeple-jacked and taken over easily by external groups easily if they are not careful enough.

For amateur blogs run by a team of freelance writers, they cannot afford to be choosy and have to “open their doors” wide to all those who wish to join their team which makes them vulnerable to being steeplejacked.

The government can send dozen of its agents undercover to write for these sites and when the time is ripe, mount a coup to take over their sites entirely or “tie the hands” of their key writers, for example, by requesting that they refrain from writing articles critical of PAP leaders.

Students’ sites can be easily tamed and controlled by undergraduates on government scholarships while other sites can be equally steeplejacked by civil servants themselves.

Furthermore, amateur bloggers usually have full-time jobs elsewhere and they will probably stop blogging when their passion fade away or when they encounter a life-changing even such as marriage.

With time and patience, it is not too difficult to assume control of these sites and set the agenda for them once the founding members have left or become inactive thereby nullifying their “threat” once and for all.

Unfortunately, steeplejacking does not work on closed groups like us because we do not have a proper team – our correspondents are paid to write and they have no influence over our editorial stance or policy.

Working through a proxy

In the aftermath of the Malaysian general elections, the Barisan Nasional government realized the urgency of having their own mouthpiece in the new media and began recruiting and funding bloggers to promote their cause.

One of the most popular semi-professional news sites with a sizable readership was rumored to be funded by close aides of Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi himself.

Cabinet ministers and Barisan MPs rushed to set up their own blogs to establish a presence in cyberspace.

MCA President and Transport Minister Ong Tee Keat has used his blog to launch attacks against his enemies within MCA after he was sidelined by the mainstream Chinese media.

The government should seriously consider working with bloggers to reach out to Singapore netizens rather than depending on official sites like REACH which suffer from a low readership.

The PAP did attempt to engage netizens with their P65 blog which was set up immediately post-2006 general elections, but it backfired dramatically because the MPs were too restrained, the site was updated infrequently and most importantly there were too few interactions with the readers.

With blogosphere largely hostile towards the establishment, it is imperative that the government seek out external partners to serve as a bridge between them and netizens.

A suitable partner will be a site with already a high volume of traffic and is not averse to the idea of collaborating with the government.

The level of influence exerted by a site is largely determined by the size of its readership and content.

Extreme blogs usually have low readership to begin with and do not pose much of a threat. Moderate sites with a high readership will help negate the influence of these blogs to a certain extent.

The way forward

Though the Singapore new media still lags behind its Malaysian counterpart, it is only be a matter of time before somebody starts a “Singaporekini” – a full-fledged internet newspaper run by professional journalists on a full-time basis.

The government has to adapt itself slowly to this new reality and acknowledge that there will be new stakeholders in Singapore media industry other than SPH.

When Malaysiakini was first founded in 1996, then Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamed dismissed it as an “amateurish” site. 10 years later, he was forced to eat his own words by granting Malaysiakini a face-to-face interview.

Likewise, out of the myriad of blogs which dot Singapore’s blogosphere today, there will one or two which will emerge from it to challenge the dominance of SPH.

One day, it will attain a higher readership than even CNA. Can the government afford to ignore its existence then?

The next generation will spend most of their time in front of their desktops or laptops. The online new media will eventually replace the print media as the primary source of news for most people.

Everywhere else, newspapers are closing down or forced to scale down their operations due to declining profits. SPH is only able to sustain itself so far because it has no competitors in the domestic market.

The government has to dispel its suspicions of the new media and start engaging it as an equal partner.

Today, we may be amateurs, but one day, we will be professionals. Time is on our side.

Using repressive measures to crack down on the new media will only breed distrust, cynicism and enmity. An adversarial new media will not do the government any good.

It may be time for MICA to rethink its “hands-off” approach and replace it with a proactive one to seek out potential partners in the new media.