Packable politics and its press

I guess it was telling that I didn't know the mainstream press had launched a counter attack on the blogosphere and brought the curtain down on any further discussion of Mas Selamat Kastari's escape until I read about it on various blogs. It so happened that I wasn't reading the mainstream press during those few days, thus I was blithely unaware of the change in the wind.

Apparently, a few days after Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong rejected calls for Home Affairs Minister Wong Kan Seng to resign over the escape of the alleged terrorist from Whitley Road Detention Centre, there was a column in the Straits Times, which The Online Citizen described in its editorial thus:

The mainstream press, to hide the consequences of their political timidity, then utilizes another fencing maxim: the best defense is a good offense.

When all else fails, blame the bloggers/kopitiam patrons

The tactics are simple: dismiss the expressions of anger as the rantings of vocal netizens, the educated elite, or those too uneducated to think for themselves. Paint them as unpatriotic, borderline traitors out to muddy the country’s reputation at any expense.

-- The Online Citizen, 24 April 2008, Link

Xenoboy in his blog noted how it followed the same style as a previous

...diatribe against the Internet with exactly the same angry descriptive barrage of the evils in cyberspace, crawling with bad people, filled with nasty brutish demons and poisonous commentaries. Years later, another fellow journalist repeats the same diatribe on this lawless space known as cyberspace...

-- Xenoboysg, April 2008, Link  

Andrew Loh, writing also in The Online Citizen, said this was hardly the first time that netizens were being attacked. It's been going on for more than a month, since soon after the escape.

In the past month or so, these have taken the form of outright disparagement of bloggers – most of them at how bloggers have reacted to Mas Selamat Kastari’s escape from the Whitley Road Detention Center and the aftermath.

In a Straits Times article titled, "Mas Selamat wins in blame game", on March 15 2008, Paul Jacob described blog postings as being full of "sarcastic comments", "speculation, innuendo and finger-pointing", and bloggers as "detractors" who are "baying for blood", and engaging in a "blame game".

Jacob goes on further:

The rants in cyberspace take pleasure in knocking Singapore’s firm and nononsense (sic) reputation.

And, oblivious to his own complicity in doing exactly the same, Jacob ends his piece with:

This is not a time when others should be given room to take potshots and sow seeds that, in some cases, appear designed to cause discord and to cast doubt on and undermine the work and reputation of individuals and institutions.

Phew! That’s a lot of accusations to hurl, eh?

Jacob is the Deputy Political Editor of the ST, mind you.

And he talks about ranting. Rather funny, isn’t it? Ironic, for sure.

-- Andrew Loh, the Online citizen, 28 April 2008, Link

Gerald Giam observed:

Scanning the forum pages of our English dailies, I notice a glaring absence of any letters about Mas Selamat-gate.

This could be due to one of two things: 

1. Singaporeans have really moved on, as SM Goh Chok Tong and Straits Times' political editor Chua Lee Hong exhorted us to; or

2. The media is rejecting all letters about the issue, and is failing its national duty of reflecting the views of Singaporeans.

-- Singapore Patriot, April 2008, Link 

Apparently, this followed a call by Senior Minister (and former Prime Minister) Goh Chok Tong to "enter a 'new phase of reflection and repair' and to move on", according to a news report attributed to Channel NewsAsia [1]. 

* * * * *

 
In both stooping this low to engage in a slanging match with new media, and in so obsequiously executing the government's wishes to extricate itself from further discussion of ministerial responsibility for the escape, the credibility of the mainstream media cannot but be damaged. Doubtless, this is something that the folks at the media-watching blog, journalism.sg, will be concerned about.

What I am more interested in is the risk of a government being seduced by its own propaganda into thinking that an issue is securely closed when in fact it is not. The issue may continue to fester, but a compliant mainstream media lulls the government into thinking otherwise -- complacency writ large, in other words. This, especially if a government convinces itself that views expressed on the internet are unrepresentative and merely rantings and therefore not worth taking into account.

For example, the government might have thought that the case for high ministerial salaries has been convincingly won, or at least that people have resigned themselves to it. But in fact, it might have been the fuel to the demand for Wong Kan Seng's resignation.

To law academic Eugene Tan at the Singapore Management University (SMU), however, much of the anger is not really over the Mas Selamat escape per se.

The latter, he believes, has simply become a 'lightning rod' for other issues.

In other words, when people vent anger over the escape, they are really venting anger over issues such as ministerial salaries and perceived government complacency.

-- Straits Times, 24 April 2008, Views aplenty, from 'Govt
should do more' to 'move on' Link  

This is a very insightful explanation. Indeed, it is hard to see how the detainee's escape by itself can exercise people so much since it is not a bread-and-butter issue though part of the reason may have been the way the government (through the mainstream media, again) deliberately raised the profile of the incident at the beginning. For a week, there was page after page in the newspapers about the manhunt, all reinforcing the opening line that Mas Selamat was an extremely dangerous man who planned to plant bombs around Singapore, poison our water supply and fly planes into Changi airport, just like the 2001 attacks in New York City.

After making such a lot of noise about how serious the matter was, after marshalling thousands of volunteers to put posters up -- and now these ubiquitous posters only serve to remind us about the government's incompetence and impotence -- after inconveniencing tens of thousands at border checkpoints, it is naïve of the government to think that people won't hold the highest levels responsible.

Or maybe they knew that, but were confident that, with their sway over editors, they could turn the tap on and off whenever it suited them.

However, my own tale of how I wasn't reading the papers during those critical days, but was getting my news from the web, should be a cautionary reminder that the government may be overrating the significance of the tap that they do control.

The nature of newspapers (and TV news) is such that daily, editors make judgements about what is topical. In Singapore's case, what is topical is limited by assessments as to what the government would not want as news. The absence of certain headlines makes it easy for the government to believe that certain issues have been successfully packed away.

However, human assessments of others, including politicians, don't operate like that. Disappointments, betrayals and any number of impressions are not packed away, but are just added to the pot. From time to time, the pot boils over, and all these issues, which our ruling circles may think over and done with, resurface.

On the other hand, you could argue that it's not so simple. People also forget, and that's how governments get away with administering bitter policy pills in the early part of their electoral term. This is true, but unless you have a free media, it is hard to gauge what people remember and what they forget.

Is the internet that free media? Is there no truth that it tends to represent only the privileged young? Perhaps there is, but we should soberly remind ourselves that in Malaysia's recent general election, the tone of the internet chatter was a better predictor of the voting outcome than the tone of the country's mainstream press.

Dangers lurk when a government begins to rely on their ability to get the media dog to jump at their bidding. Instead of doing right, it may at times become more tempting for those in power to do quiet. Today, it's a detainee's escape that is "no longer topical", tomorrow it might be a bread-and-butter issue that resonates more widely with ordinary voters. Would the government bulldoze its way through and rely on its editors to ignore popular feeling and "move on"? 

Yet another day, it might be scandalous insensitivity or incompetence in some area. Would the culture of impunity remain undisturbed because the press can be relied upon to turn off the tap of criticism?

* * * * *

 
Take for example, the way our sovereign wealth fund, The Government of Singapore Investment Corp (GIC), has invested in UBS, a large Swiss bank.

When UBS began reporting its losses from the subprime mortgage crisis last year, GIC extended a helping hand. It subscribed to 11 billion Swiss Francs (US$9.74 billion) worth of mandatory convertible notes in December 2007. The notes had a coupon rate of 9 percent, and when converted in 2 years' time, it would, depending on the conversation rate, give GIC a 9 percent stake in the bank, becoming its largest single shareholder. Or so the announcement then said [2].

Within 3 months of pocketing Singapore's money, UBS admitted to another SwFr 19 billion worth of losses. According to a Guardian newspaper report dated 22 March 2008, "Shares in the Swiss bank are down 46% so far this year" [3]. To shore up its capital base, UBS announced a rights issue of SwFr 15 billion, which would dilute GIC's December investment unless it was willing to ante up more money [4].

Yet, in a recent interview with Bloomberg, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew sounded sanguine.

'We are buying into something which we intend to keep for the next two, three decades and grow with them.'

So, Singapore will gauge the success of its investments in [Citigroup] and UBS in five to 10 years, said Mr Lee.

-- Straits Times, 1 May 2008, GIC open to
buying more quality bank assets: MM Lee

He also refuted demands for greater transparency and accountability. Being too upfront about one's investment strategies would allow competitors to stymie your plans, he pointed out.

Secondly, being too transparent may raise people's expectations for the Government to spend GIC's returns.

'You raise expectations of your own people, and they say: 'Let's spend it. We've made 8 per cent last year - why are we keeping 4 per cent? Let's spend 6 per cent instead of 4 per cent.' And so on,' said Mr Lee.

'These are populist pressures which we have to buffer.'

In order to avoid such pressures, GIC also chose to disclose its profits and losses over a five-year or 10-year period, rather than year by year as publicly listed companies are required to do.

-- Straits Times, 1 May 2008, MM: Good reasons
for GIC not to be 'too transparent'

Five years is an awfully long time. You can lose a lot of money in that period without anyone knowing. There are many other ways to be publicly accountable which Lee does not seem eager to consider and which our mainstream reporters aren't eager to ask. For example, GIC could report annually a brief statement of gains and losses, and then after a delay of 12 months (so that others cannot anticipate its investment moves) provide more detail.

As for keeping knowledge of profits from the public because people would shortsightedly demand windfalls, I think it only signals his condescending attitude towards the average Singaporean's maturity. It is also convenient that, with the same 5-year blackout policy, losses can also be kept from the public.

We are supposed to place complete trust in the government, it appears. After all,

But these two banks have 'very good franchises, brand names, good managements', Mr Lee pointed out.

UBS and Citi were 'led astray over these sub-prime mortgages', but with 'the franchise of the banks, the expertise that they have, under proper leadership, they will be able to recover and rise again', he said.

-- Straits Times, 1 May 2008, GIC open to
buying more quality bank assets: MM Lee

"Led astray", he said. Meaning not responsible. A victim of others' shenanigans. And as for the immense "franchise" and "expertise" of UBS, I was immediately reminded of Barings, the merchant bank founded in 1762 with a solid, centuries-old reputation, but which collapsed in a heap in 1995 due to the actions of a single Singapore-based trader trader, Nick Leeson.

Even more worryingly, the 24 April 2008 edition of the Economist magazine gave a less upbeat assessment of UBS than Lee, in its story dissecting a summary of the bank's internal investigation into how it ended up in such a mess. That summary was released on 21 April. According to the magazine,

The report gives three broad explanations for the bank's woes. The first was the investment-banking arm's preoccupation with growth. Another was the reliance of the control team on flawed measures of risk. A third was the culture of the bank.

-- The Economist, 24 April 2008, Wealth mismanagement

After detailing how the bank overlooked the risks it was getting into, through getting its priorities wrong and a culture of executives' taking each others' word that things were fine, the magazine asked whether this culture continues.

There is no suggestion that anything untoward was going on. Assurances that risks were being properly managed were given in good faith, says Rupert Jolley, the UBS managing director who led the investigation: "The culture of the bank was to rely upon each other's word." But there was also a clear incentive to set aside any doubts as long as revenues were rising.

The report only deals with write-downs up to the end of last year. Nonetheless its conclusions implicitly raise awkward questions about the bank's new leaders. If the culture of the bank was at fault, then can an insider such as Peter Kurer, who was confirmed as chairman at the annual meeting, fix it? The report forlornly noted the "reactive" appointment of the investment bank's leadership team to replace those who had left to join DCRM; could the same be said of Mr Kurer, who was plucked from the position of general counsel to replace Marcel Ospel, the former chairman? One large shareholder describes the combination of Mr Kurer and Marcel Rohner, the newish chief executive, as "terrifyingly weak".

-- ibid

That's quite a different assessment of UBS from Lee's. Are we slip-sliding into another scandal? Will there be calls for over-sized heads to roll if it comes to pass? Will such calls be packed away by mainstream editors once they become inconveniently loud and a ministerial wrist is flicked?

© Yawning Bread 

Footnotes

1. Source: http://asia.news.yahoo.com/080426/5/singapore343852.html 
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2. Sources: Channel NewsAsia and NicholasMong. 
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3. See the Guardian story and the Asia Sentinel story.
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4. That's what people seem to be saying in various news stories, but I'm not sure that the expected 9 percent stake would be diluted. it depends on the terms of the bond with regard to the conversion rate.
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Addenda

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