These mechanisms are meant to ensure that newspapers in Singapore live up to their lofty calling, which is to report fairly and objectively, the "facts" or the "truth".

The problem that few other than Cherian George, a media academic with Nanyang Technological University, have pointed out, is that this straitjacket meant to keep the standards of the mainstream press high, will also suffocate them. When they are seen as pro-government or overly restrained compared to the freer if wilder blogosphere, they will be severely handicapped in retaining reader loyalty.

* * * * *

 
At the 16th Annual Conference of the Asian Media Information and Communication (AMIC) Centre, held recently in Singapore, one question on many people's minds was how newspapers can hold their own against the rising tide of blogs. Much bandied about was the idea that if a source is trusted, it should be able to retain readers. But what would sustain trust? What would destroy it?

Alan Knight from Central Queensland University, had a slide with the question, "Why distrust journalists?" The slide listed 6 answers:

Mainstream agendas 
Official sources 
Propaganda as news 
Corporate self-interest 
Inaccuracies, etc 
Self-referencing culture

Our local media companies display all these sins aplenty. They regularly champion the official or mainstream agenda. Their inordinate respect for official sources as authoritative is another well-known failing. Propaganda as news -- oh, plenty. As for corporate self-interest, one needs to look no further than Straits Times' incessant promotion of its own Stomp portal and Today's unabashed promotion of parent-company Mediacorp's TV stars.

However, media and news consumers are not obliged to stay loyal to them. There is already evidence that regular readership of the main newspapers is slowly falling; it is particularly noticeable among  younger adults.

Look around us. What are they doing when they have a spot of free time? They don't read. They're listening to their iPods, or playing electronic games on their hand-held devices. When they do buy a newspaper, it is often The New Paper, flipping quickly to the sports pages.

Knight said that in many countries when he asked for a show of hands, he finds young people blogging more than they read newspapers. Increasingly, they are getting information about the world from blogs.

Oh, that's doom, our ministers must be saying.

Then a paper presented by George offered a new take on the issue and got me thinking. The notion that newspapers should be impartial and objective is a rather recent thing. Even the whole idea that newspapers should be products of big commercial enterprises is ahistorical. As recently as a century or two ago, information for the public was often in the form of partisan pamphlets, championing one cause or another, much like what we see today in newsletters of various groups and societies. Or the Falungong's Epoch Times -- an amazing oddity in Singapore's mediascape.

There was even a longish period in Singapore's own history when newspapers were not expected to be objective. George reminded us that from the late 19th century to the 1970s, our numerous Chinese and even Malay newspapers were highly partisan. Many were small outfits run by passionate owner-publishers whose primary motivation was more their own causes than profit. They campaigned against the decadent imperial regime in Qing China, then against Japanese aggression, then against colonialism. Malays newspapers focussed on Malay rights and so on.

Today, they may have disappeared from our local media scene, but in many other countries, such cause-driven newspapers can easily be found. Sometimes they even dominate the news market, other times, they exist alongside "objective"-type publications. That these (what the Singapore government would dismiss as "slanted") newspapers can have, as a group, big market shares in other countries, or in our own past, should remind us that maybe humans don't really care as much for the dispassionate, "objective" news as our government and media corporations would like us to believe.

Here's a thought: In style and content, these cause-driven newspapers are more like blogs than the Straits Times. If they can have big market shares, what is so unimaginable that one day, Singaporeans might be relying more on newsblogs than the Straits Times? We'd merely be going back to the future. 

* * * * *

 
Yet a society with a media scene dominated by agenda-driven small newspapers, newsblogs or whatever you call them, will tend to display fissiparous tendencies. It is undeniable that a great newspaper (print or digital, the technology doesn't really matter) enables a national conversation by which a society can learn and find its way forward. Just as how the cities of Ancient Greece considered it important to have a civic square for public debates, so it must be important to have a platform today.

But remember, the key word is "conversation". Do we even have that from our mainstream media? Or are they vehicles for a monologue? As much as we bemoan the socially fragmenting effects of the new information age, the fact is, if our newspapers continue to behave as they have, to be as tightly regulated as they are, then let's not imagine that there's any great loss if readers desert them and they eventually atrophy into insignificance. The paradox is this: if the government really cares about nation-building, they should free the press.

© Yawning Bread