By Dr Tafataona Mahoso
BEFORE Zimbabwe scrapped the IMF-prescribed Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP), some of the most original features I wrote for my ‘African Focus’ column in The Sunday Mail dealt with glaring differences between ESAP and the economic, political and social reforms which South East Asian nations undertook in the late 1960s to late 1980s.
In their stampede to sell ESAP to Zimbabweans, local, regional and foreign media were falsely misrepresenting the IMF’s SAP prescriptions as the bitter medicine the country needed to swallow in order to achieve its own equivalent of the so-called ‘Asian Tigers economic miracle’.
One story, the same media suppressed here about the ‘Asian Tigers’, was on how the latter handled the press. In their determination to scrap or prevent media regulation in Zimbabwe under ESAP and to misrepresent the ‘Asian Tigers economic miracle’, the press here suppressed the media policy aspects of economic and political reform in South East Asia, for example Singapore, from 1959 to 1990.
Fortunately, the first and long-serving Prime Minister of Singapore, the late Lee Kuan Yew, documented the performance of his government and his political party, the People’s Action Party (PAP) in his books: From Third World to First and Lee Kuan Yew, Citizen Singapore: How To Build a Nation, which was based on conversations.
Chapter 14 of the first book is called ‘Managing the Media’ and dedicated to that subject, covering the long period especially from independence in 1965 to 1988.
National languages, education and media
First, the Prime Minister and his party took care and made efforts to understand the complex relationship between national languages and culture, education and media.
In Lee Kuan Yew’s own words: “I decided to preserve the best nine of the Chinese (language) schools under a special financial assistance plan or SAP.
We provided them with additional teachers to enable the pupils to learn English and Chinese through special immersion programmes.
The SAP schools succeeded in retaining the formality, discipline and social courtesies of traditional Chinese schools.
The ethos in these schools was, and still is, superior to that of the English language schools, which tended to be more slack in these matters.
Today most SAP schools are premier institutions with modern facilities to match their proud history and traditions.”
The government of Singapore promoted Mandarin as a vehicle for unifying all the children from Chinese communities who used dialects.
And generations later, the Prime Minister proudly wrote: “We had made the right decision in 1965 at independence to teach Mandarin as a second language. The seven different major South Chinese dialects spoken in Singapore made it easier to convert all to Mandarin.”
The next strategic step the government and PAP deliberately took was to seek to understand how the realities of language and culture on the island related to and affected the media terrain and what policies were needed to make sure that the majority of the media would reflect and project the aspirations of Singapore’s people.
According to the Prime Minister: “It took many years before a younger generation of journalists in the 1980s recognised that the political culture of Singapore was, and will stay, different from the Western norm.
The Chinese and Malay press do not model themselves on newspapers in the West.
Their cultural practice is for constructive support for policies they agree with, and criticism in measured terms when they do not.”
But this constructive approach was not shared by older, more established journalists working for foreign media owners, especially British and North American.
So, the first major challenge to PAP and the government came from The Straits Times and its editor Bill Simmons.
A former senior writer for the paper who had moved over to the government confirmed to the Prime Minister’s office that the paper was owned by British interests and its goal was to prevent PAP from winning the 1959 general election.
Lee Kuan Yew confronted Simmons, telling him that he knew the paper was planning to relocate to Malaysia and, therefore, was not committed to staying and doing business in Singapore.
The paper rebutted and denied the allegation through its local senior man called Leslie Hoffman.
But Hoffman, in fact, left Singapore before polling day and a few years later he settled in Australia.
When PAP won the election, The Straits Times relocated to Malaysia, but the new government of Singapore under the same Prime Minister went out of its way to lure other media houses to the country to replace those that had left and to make sure the press remained vibrant.
Sensing this move, Simmons and The Straits Times eventually changed their editorial policy in order to fit in the new press rules and to come back to Singapore.
Two publications, The Eastern Star and The Singapore Herald were fingered as shadowy outfits because their shareholding and funding were not transparent.
The latter, it turned out, was funded by Chase Manhattan Bank through some outfit in Hong Kong; and Lee Kuan Yew took it upon himself to confront the bank’s chairman, David Rockefeller, to ask him why the bank would engage in what appeared to be money laundering for dubious media outfits.
Rockefeller said it was one of his second vice-presidents who had financed the project without Rockefeller’s knowledge.
This of course was not true.
It turned out that The Singapore Herald was not viable. It kept being tossed around from one foreign donor to another against Singapore’s regulations.
Rather than be condemned in absentia at the International Press Institute (IPI) annual assembly, the Prime Minister opted to address the assembly.
He told them Singapore needed the media“…to reinforce, not to undermine, the cultural values and social attitudes being inculcated in our schools and universities.
Without these we can never hope to raise the living standards of our people.”
He proceeded to give examples of incidents where people had been killed and public violence provoked by false or hateful media stories both in Singapore and Malaysia:
“The Press Foundation of Asia, an affiliate of the IPI, issued a statement asking us not to cancel the paper’s licence and invited me (Lee Kuan Yew) to speak at the annual IPI assembly in Helsinki in June 1971.
Before leaving for Helsinki, I cancelled the printing licence of The Singapore Herald.”
The IPI had to be told face-to-face that they had no right to dictate their own local culture to the rest of humanity.
Later, in 1977, Singapore “…passed laws to prohibit any person or his or her nominee from holding more than three percent of the ordinary shares of a newspaper and created a special category of shares called management shares.
The minister had the authority to decide which shareholders would have management shares.”
The management shares were allocated to Singapore’s four major national banks because they were deemed committed to the country’s development, growth and prosperity.
In the 1980s, Singapore moved from concern over who was who among shareholders of media establishments to a focus on enforcing the right to reply and punishing those who would not respect it.
The punishment would no longer be in the form of cancellation of the publishing licence but reduction of circulated copies of the paper in order to curtail the spread and impact of lies and distortions.
The first publication to violate the right to reply law was Time magazine.
The government demanded publication of a letter from the editor correcting three errors of fact.
Time refused but instead offered to do two versions of the story neither of which satisfied the need for correction.
The government punished the publication by reducing its circulation allotment from 18 000 to 9 000 copies and, later, to just 2 000.
At that point Time published the rebuttal in full before the restriction was lifted.
The next publication to refuse the right to reply by the government was the Asian Wall Street Journal (AWSJ). Its circulation was cut from 5 000 to 4 000 copies before the US Department of State tried to intervene on the side of the AWSJ.
The circulation was further cut to just 500 copies and the three letters which were at issue released to the public.
Then the paper asked to keep its circulation numbers in exchange for giving away copies for free.
The government replied that such an offer would be acceptable only if the free copies carried no advertisement.
The paper did not want to forfeit advertisements.
That ended the struggle.
The next paper to violate the rules was another North American publication called Asiaweek.
Its circulation was, therefore, reduced from 11 000 to 500 copies before it relented and published the required rebuttals.
At the end of 1987, the Far Eastern Economic Review, another North American publication, violated ‘right-to-reply rules’ and had its circulation cut from 9 000 to 500 copies because the editor tried to be defiant.
Before the dispute between the government and the AWSJ was fully settled, the Prime Minister was invited to address the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington DC in April 1988.
He defended Singapore’s media policy as follows:
“Singapore’s domestic debate is a matter for Singapore. We allow (North) American journalists in Singapore in order to report Singapore to their countrymen.
We allow their papers to sell in Singapore so that we can know what foreigners are reading about us.
But we cannot allow them to assume a role in Singapore that the American media play in America, that is, that of invigilator, adversary and inquisitor of the administration.
Only Americans can control a business which influences opinion in America.
That is why Rupert Murdoch took up US citizenship before he purchased the independent TV stations of the Metro media group in 1985.”
Finally, in 1993 The Economist attacked the Government of Singapore for prosecuting a government officer, a reporter and the editor of his paper over violations of the Official Secrets Act.
The editor refused to publish the government’s letter correcting errors in the attack.
As punishment, The Economist’s circulation was cut to 7 500 copies and told there would be further cuts if the magazine continued to refuse publication of the required reply.
The Economist eventually published the government’s rebuttal letter before the restriction was lifted.
Lessons from Singapore’s media management policy
First, the governing party and the government synchronised language, culture and media, demanding that the nation’s unique requirements and interests arising from their inter-relatedness should shape media policy.
This demand, of course, has now to be adjusted to the difficult age of digitisation and convergence but it remains most relevant.
Second, the Prime Minister and his team were diligent, hands-on and thorough in their attention to media at home and abroad.
Nothing was left to chance.
Third, this thoroughness gave them confidence to challenge both journalists and politicians who tried to foist their own domestic values and norms upon Singapore in the name of ‘globalisation’.
Fourth and last, but not least, the issue of advertising revenue remains relevant.
The digitised media, notorious for fragmenting cultures and polarising communities, are making money and after money just like those of Lee Kuan Yew’s time.
If policymakers can find ways of getting at that revenue then they will have the clue to ways to stop or control at least some of the worst damage caused by and through the new media technology.
Society needs to re-organise its institutions to be able to reap benefits even from the disruptive digital technologies.
That can be achieved only if there are competent teams attending to the new challenges with diligence and thoroughness.
