Media : Singapore’s Paradox: Hostility...

It is one of the closest U.S. allies in the Pacific, offering access to military facilities at a time when the Philippines is trying to boot the Americans out. But despite a strong affinity for the United States and many aspects of its culture, Singapore continues to take a defiant stand against what it considers to be the unwelcome incursions of Western news media.

Two developments earlier this month help illustrate Singapore’s stand, perhaps the toughest in the developed world:

* The Asian Wall Street Journal, sister publication of the Journal in the United States, announced that it was halting circulation in the island republic after a lengthy legal dispute with the Singapore government.

* Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, whose political party has ruled Singapore since it gained independence in 1965, issued a scathing criticism of the Western media, accusing television inparticular of creating false hopes among Chinese students during last year’s disturbances in Beijing and charging that American news organizations had set out two years ago to deliberately change the view of Congress about Cambodia.

“Singapore is a totally urban society with state-of-the-art-telecommunications, and no government can effectively censor what the people read,” Lee declared. “But the government can and will insist on no interference in the domestic politics of Singapore.”

Singapore itself has a fairly tame domestic press, which never criticizes government policy. Singaporeans are also denied permission to erect satellite dishes to receive foreign television programs such as CNN, and videotapes entering the country are heavily censored, primarily to maintain a prudish standard about sex in films. But books are not censored and the government retransmits the foreign service of the British Broadcasting Corp., including its news programs.

By contrast, other Southeast Asian countries limit critical reporting in the local vernacular press, but few besides Vietnam and Cambodia seek to control what foreign publications circulate among the educated elite and foreigners.

In Singapore, the government draws the line at what it considers “interference in domestic politics,” which it defines broadly as Singapore’s political system, public institutions, ideology and government policies.

Its hostility toward the Western media is often regarded by both journalists and native Singaporeans as a paradox because among Southeast Asian nations it has the least to hide: a booming economy, with a corruption-free government, an enviable lifestyle and civic amenities that are the wonder of Asia.

Still, Singapore has clashed over the years with a number of foreign publications, including Time magazine and Asiaweek, a regional news weekly. Lee has even become personally embroiled in disputes with foreign columnists, challenging one--Bernard Levin of the London Times--to a televised debate.

But never has a dispute lasted as long or been as bitter as the one pitting Singapore against the Asian Wall Street Journal and the Far Eastern Economic Review, a regional weekly which is also owned by the Journal’s parent, Dow Jones & Co.

The government has prevented the Hong Kong-based Review from basing a correspondent here since 1987; it similarly barred the Journal from having a correspondent in 1988. The confrontation briefly bubbled into an international incident when Secretary of States James A. Baker III wrote to ask the government to relax the ban for his visit in August, but the Singaporeans refused.

The dispute with the Review stemmed from an article over detentions of church workers, while the Journal was criticized for an article about a second-tier Singaporean securities market called Sesdaq. The Singaporeans were angered when they were not given a “right of reply” in the form of lengthy letters that they insisted could not be edited for publication; they then tried to buy advertisements that were also refused.

When the Journal published an editorial critical of Singaporean courts’ handling of the legal case, Lee sued the newspaper for libel.

In 1987, the government ordered the Review to limit its circulation to 500 copies, and the magazine decided to halt sales in Singapore. So now a pirated version of the magazine circulates with government sanction, but with the advertisements blanked out.

The Journal had also seen its circulation limited to 400 copies, down from 5,000 before the ban. In announcing its decision to halt circulation, the Journal cited a new press law passed by Parliament in August.

The law requires foreign publications to obtain a permit from the Ministry of Communications and Information. The law gives the minister the power to reduce circulation at any time and to revoke the permit without giving a reason. The minister may also require the publication to put up a deposit to meet costs arising out of potential court actions.

“What the government of Singapore wants is for the foreign press to practice self-censorship,” the Journal said in a subsequent editorial. “A facade of factual reporting will be allowed, but any statement by authorities must be taken at face value; lest it disturb either the political monopoly of the (ruling) People’s Action Party or the pretense of democracy, the press shall not report the opinions of critics within Singapore, let alone the defenses of those in disputes with the government.”

Obviously, Singapore takes a different tack. In correspondence with the Journal, Goh Chok Tong, the first deputy prime minister, said foreign publications should report “events in Singapore as outsiders, for outsiders.”

“It is not their responsibility to protect Singaporean citizens against what they may perceive to be an authoritarian government, or to ensure the functioning of a ‘healthy democracy’ in Singapore,” he said.

A Western diplomat in Singapore described Lee as a strong personality who by force of will turned the island from a backwater swamp into a world financial center. “The preoccupation is to maintain control,” the diplomat said, “and the Western press represents a wild card. He can’t control it, and there is a potential for destabilizing the situation.”

But Lee went further in his speech, which was given to the British Commonwealth Press Union in Hong Kong earlier this month. He said news now travels so quickly that governments have to adjust their ways of formulating policy. Lee suggested for example that when Dan Rather of CBS interviewed Saddam Hussein of Iraq, “he ventured into the domain of U.S. foreign policy at a time of crisis.”

Lee blamed television for creating false hopes in China’s rebellious students last year during the Tian An Men Square demonstrations. He also blamed the print media for causing excessive optimism in Hong Kong after a hand-over agreement was signed between Britain and China in 1984. After last year’s events, he said “the press created excessive pessimism.”

Lee said the American press “campaigned tenaciously and skillfully” against the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. The result was that the Bush Administration altered course, he said, while the situation on the ground had not changed.

He charged that while the American press had discovered that it could move mountains in Washington, “they were not an irresistible force in a foreign Third World country like Singapore.”

But why go to all the trouble of so public a clash, he asked rhetorically.

“Well, among other things, it brings home to Singaporeans that regardless of the pontifications of foreign correspondents and commentators, it is the values of the elected government of Singapore that will prevail.”