Yawning Bread was mentioned in the voice-over and a screenshot from this site got about one second on the telly.

Another site that was also shown was Singapore Election Watch, but as you can see from that hyperlinked posting, the owner of that site pointed out that his pages had been edited before being shown on TV.

As shown on ChannelNewsAsia	The actual blog page
As shown on ChannelNewsAsia	The actual blog page

(Above images obtained from Singapore Election Watch)

If true, this is indefensible. While it is within the news channel's right to choose what sites it shows in its newsclip, it has no right to modify any webpage and then purport to be showing that website to the public. To do so would be equivalent to misrepresenting what was on that weblog. It's like putting words into people's mouths or deliberately reporting selected words out of context, which would be most unprofessional. If a TV station did something like this in the US, I believe heads would roll.

But did CNA do it?

On 16 May, someone forwarded to me an email from Nancy Ang of Mediacorp Corporate Services saying they did not.

There were several websites that our reporter, Farah Abdul Rahim, filmed the pictures she used in her news report. 

www.singaporeelection.blogspot.com was one of them. 

But on no account did she doctor the pictures. 

On the two days she filmed the websites, 9 and 10 May, the headlines ‘Lee Hsien Loong’s Territory Up for Grabs’ and ‘Shady Company #1’ were not the headings over the two pictures. In fact, when we last checked on 16 May, the picture of Mr Lee and the PAP logo is not on the webpage. 

As to your reference to the picture of Mr Gomez, the report used a quick zoom out shot. This is a preference of camera technique, with no other agenda intended. 

The entry in www.singaporeelection.blogspot.com implied that our reporter deliberately removed segments of the pictures when she did not.

Nancy Ang was not referring to what I had written but to what was written in this entry in Singapore Election Watch. The bit about Gomez is not relevant to this essay.

On receiving a copy of this email, my first instinct was to believe it, for  is extremely hard to think that CNA's statement is inaccurate or insincere. This is especially as Singapore Election Watch's owner is anonymous. Greater credibility should always be given to the party that is prepared to stand up for its views than to the anonymous party.

But a little voice told me to check something before rushing to conclusions.

What I found was that the missing words in the first TV capture frame, "Lee Hsien Loong's Territory up for Grabs", formed the title of the blog entry that contained the photograph of Lee. See here. It was dated 4 May 2006.

The other missing words, "Shady Company #1", were also the title of the blog entry, dated 10 May 2006, see here.

If you click through, you will also notice that Singapore Election Watch changed its masthead and layout style some time between 10 May and 16 May. This unnecessarily complicates its accusation against ChannelNewsAsia, for the argument can be made that if the blog owner changed the stylesheet, why should we believe that he didn't change any text too?

Yet, the question is this: Could those blog entries that CNA saw and filmed on 9 and 10 May contain no title at all? The issue is not about different/changed words, but no words at all. My understanding of how blogs work is that when one makes a new blog entry, one is prompted to put in a title for the new post. How likely is it that a blogger will not put in a title to his blog entry?

How likely was it that out of the hundreds of blog entries that Singapore Election Watch had on its site, the two that somehow did not have titles were the two that CNA filmed?

Secondly, the titles for blog entries also serve as the hyperlink targets for those specific entries. Many blog programs, I believe, therefore make it mandatory to have a title for each entry, otherwise the linking won't work.

So how does one explain the absence of titles on the two pages shown on CNA? It seems rather curious.

Date stamps were also missing from CNA's version. There is nothing that any blogger can do to remove date stamps for any particular posting. It comes built in with any blogging program. So why weren't they visible on the TV?

The owner of the weblog Singapore Election Watch has reiterated that the titles and the date stamps had always been there. To support this, he pointed out that the RSS feed from those two entries would demonstrate the titles always came with them. I can't vouch for what was on the RSS feed, not being a recipient of it, but it certainly sounds like a good way to verify the question.

The more I think about this, the more I feel that CNA's denial was, prima facie, not 100% convincing. 

Someone wrote in to me to suggest that one possible reason why CNA might want to erase the titles (if they did so, that is) was the fear that the words might be considered defamatory. That's a fair concern, but CNA could then have chosen to show other pages from Singapore Election Watch, or none at all. Given such an easy solution, it seems hard to believe that CNA would choose the more labour-intensive and unprofessional route of modifying what was on the blog before (or after) filming it. 

I can't prove where the truth lies, but it's a really strange episode.

© Yawning Bread