The truth will set Singapore media free ... well, not necessarily

'Information Minister Lee Boon Yang said the index imposes a standard that fails to take into account 'special circumstances' in Singapore, where he said journalists contribute to the nation's development and are not necessarily adversarial.'

Pravda

NOT NECESSARILY ADVERSARIAL, you understand, in much the same way that the Singapore government does not necessarily like criticism. Now you know why I refer to the Straits Times as 'Pravda' (Party Rendition and Authorised Version of Daily Announcements).

The particular criticism to which Mr Lee objected in this case was a very low rating in the annual worldwide press freedom index put out by Reporters Without Borders, an international journalists association.

Singapore was ranked 147th out of 167 countries covered in the index, one notch worse than Bhutan, one notch better than Iraq. As the table shows, within East Asia it was given a better score than Laos but a much worse one than Malaysia, leave alone Indonesia and even Cambodia.

Here are a few more things the minister had to say, as reported in Pravda: '[The index] is based largely on a different media model which favours the advocacy and adversarial role of the press. We have a different model in Singapore. This model has evolved out of our special circumstances and has enabled our media to contribute to nation building.'

You get the basic idea. There are positive and negative forces in nation building and a free press is a negative force. Left uncontrolled it will corrode the process through irresponsible commentary. Journalists must therefore be restrained and focused on contributing to national development rather than be indulged, as they are elsewhere (how could other governments be so stupid?), in their obvious natural tendency of undermining it.