"The traditional media are primarily represented by just two companies, one of them owned by Temasek, one of the state’s sovereign-wealth funds, and the other tending to have a pro-government stance. So the rise of alternative news websites, over the last six years or so, has been especially significant here. Singaporeans have taken to the internet with alacrity—especially for news about the country they call home. Perhaps the first worrisome thing to note about the MDA’s new policy was the complete lack of public consultation beforehand. The authority announced the new rules just a couple of days before their implementation—along with a starter course of ten websites that will need to be licensed (nine are owned by those two largest of Singapore’s media companies, which are often associated with the state). Critics argue this may be a strategy to ease the implementation of the controversial change. The second reason for anxiety is a bit subtler. While the ministry of communications and information has assured bloggers that they will not be affected by the new rules, the legislation doesn’t guarantee the same. The definition of “Singapore news programmes” is broad enough to include “any programme containing any news, intelligence, report of occurrence, or any matter of public interest, about any social, economic, political, cultural, artistic, sporting, scientific or any other aspect of Singapore,” though of course it “does not include any programme produced by or on behalf of the government.”
Posted on: Thu, 06 Jun 2013 06:25:24 +0000
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