In the 2006 Press Freedom Index, Singapore was ranked 146th out of 168 countries. North Korea kept its 168th place.

To illustrate how the US is not as free as people think, Mahbubani cited the experience of 2 US academics who had written a paper on the impact of the Israeli lobby on American foreign policy. No publication was prepared to carry it, he said, demonstrating that the so-called freedom to say anything one wished in the United States was hogwash.

The logic that Mahbubani was applying was quite confused [2]. Talking about "moral ambiguity" was a red herring when it came to something as specific as the Press Freedom Index. Even the example of the academic paper missed the mark.

How so? If one looks at the 50 questions [3] that make up its questionnaire, a very clear pattern can be discerned. In the main, the index seeks to assess how much coercion is applied to the media in each country. Most questions deal with coercion from the state in various forms such as journalists being arrested and imprisoned, surveillance of foreign reporters working in the country, having to be licenced, and state monopoly of TV and radio. Other questions deal with the way the state looks the other way when interest groups harass or intimidate the media, e.g. by not prosecuting the trouble-makers. At the same time, the questions also assess coercion experienced by journalists from non-state sources, but they are more in the form of murders, kidnappings, attacks on their families and such like.

The example of the 2 academics' paper not given an outlet isn't really an example of coercion; it's more an example of spurning. Not that it doesn't reduce the diversity of voices in a society, but it isn't what a layman would understand by the term "press freedom" in plain English, and is somewhat peripheral to what Reporters Sans Frontieres set out to measure. Having said that, 2 of their questions touch on such behaviour by media owners and editors; thus such shortcomings are also captured in their index to some extent.

30. Routine self-censorship in the privately-owned media?

31. Subjects that are taboo (the armed forces, government corruption, religion, the opposition, demands of separatists, human rights etc)? 

This may explain how the United States is ranked at 53rd place in the index.

"The 'white' world is not so white and the 'black' world not so black," Mahbubani said. Indeed, up to this point, Reporters Sans Frontieres may agree with him. But where they depart is when Mahbubani implies that, therefore, moral ambiguity reigns, and since there is ambiguity, rankings are meaningless.

Not at all. A ranking system that measures something quite specific -- coercion that limits press freedom -- is quite separate from something like "moral ambiguity". 

In any case, it measures relative positions of various countries, not absolute degrees of press liberty. A country doesn't have to be perfect to rank #1, it just needs to be better than all other countries. Likewise, being low down in rankings doesn't mean a country is all 'black', it just means it's worse than most others.

In other words, there is a reason why Singapore is in 146th place; the problem isn't the index. Stop kidding ourselves. The people with closed minds aren't those applying the index. Guess where they can be found?

In the last part of his speech, Mahbubani spoke about OB markers -- Singapore-speak for the boundaries, often vague and shifting, beyond which topics are taboo and likely to invite punitive action by the state (at least in Singapore). "But there are OB markers everywhere," he said. "There's no society without OB markers. And in each society, there's a constant struggle about what to report, or what not to report."

He appeared to concede that we might have "very narrow OB markers" compared to elsewhere. But in the same breath, the "national security" justification was raised. Again. We're a multi-racial country, he said (which country isn't nowadays?) We're small-sized. Therefore we benefit from "strict rules on what you can or cannot say on ethnic issues." Maybe so, maybe not, but it doesn't explain why we have narrow OB markers on political issues.

"On the other hand," he told the journalists present, "you would lose all your credibility if you are known to censor or fabricate news. To maintain your credibility, you have to develop a reputation for reporting, not distorting, the facts."

This is absurdly reductive. Journalism is way, way more than just recording and disseminating "news" or "facts". To begin with, most "facts" can be disputed, or have to be set in context. This being the case, editorial slant can make all the difference. Secondly, opinion and interpretation of events and "facts" is an equally important mission of journalism and failure to accommodate whole swathes of opinion can just as seriously impair a newspaper's or broadcast station's reputation as "distorting the facts".

By constantly misleading Singaporeans with such simplistic measures of "responsible journalism", members of our elite establishment do no favours to the maturity of our media and of political discourse in Singapore. Our media, thus mismeasured, continue to think they are faultless even as they fail to perform their full role, while our people continue to dismiss them as lackeys. Meanwhile the issues that should be aired and discussed are not, partly because there is no other wide-readership platform for them, partly too because people disengage politically when they keep gagging on such self-serving excuses from the establishment.

© Yawning Bread