I was having a drink with Choo Zheng Xi of The Online Citizen on Wednesday afternoon, speaking of nothing in particular, when I asked him, "So, is there anything newsworthy going on other than the economy?"

The day was warm, the humidity rising. Dark clouds were gathering, but the air was still. Listless. Like the news cycle.

I had been feeling a little guilty for not updating Yawning Bread for over a week. There seemed nothing else to say, and I really didn't want to keep harping on our GDP's nosedive. So what was there to write about? I was hoping Zheng Xi would light a spark.

But he too didn't think there was much else going on.

Little did we know that almost at that very moment, Lui Tuck Yew, the junior minister at the Ministry for Information, Communication and the Arts, was stuffing his foot into his mouth.

* * * * *

 
By Thursday afternoon, just about all the major blogs and forums had something to say about Lui's remarks in Parliament. A digital brushfire had broken out.

Mediacorp's 'Today' newspaper, which had carried a straightforward report on Lui's statement in its Thursday morning edition, decided to do a follow-up story.

At about 3 pm Thursday, the reporter called me. She introduced herself -– I don't think I had spoken to her before -- and launched into a series of questions. The thrust of those questions gave me the impression that the story angle would be exactly what the blogosphere was going on about: whether we agreed or disagreed with Lui's opinion. In fact, that was her first question to me, to which my response was that Lui was being unrealistic to expect "community regulation" to produce the result he wanted to see. The internet does not work like that, I said.

The other impression I had was of a reporter trying very hard to get me to say something in support of Lui. (As the conversation went on, I wondered whether the brief her editor gave her was to go ferret out netizens who would lend support to Lui's point. Prove him right.) She kept asking essentially the same question -– didn't I think that community regulation was necessary in this case? -– repeatedly, but with different phrasing.

One variant of her phrasing was whether I thought the result as seen, with so many people saying insensitive things, was bad.

I stood my ground. I said no. The result, as I saw it, was exactly what I expected to see, reflecting as it did, the range of sentiments in the Singapore cyberspace.

That's what cyberspace is about -– people offering all sorts of opinion, some clever, some funny, some sacrilegious, some insightful, some downright stupid. Also, just because something is said doesn't mean it is believed. She would later use for her story a paraphrase of this point I made.

I knew I left her with very little she could use. I hadn't offered a morsel that was "supportive" of Lui.

But she was a persistent gal. She called back around 6 pm and tried again. This time, one of the variant phrasings of the same question was something to this effect: Didn't I think, if more people had stepped in to counter the insensitive remarks, it would have helped?

I must have gotten a little impatient at that point. My reply was a little brusque, I think, for my reply went like this:

What do you mean "helped"? When you deploy a word like that, you imply the existence of a prior assumption, and that assumption is that a certain outcome is more desirable than another outcome. "Help" connotes assistance in the direction of the desired outcome. Have I not been saying that I disagreed with Lui about the desirability of the outcome he had in mind -– a scenario where close to everybody would express one and the same cloying, politically correct opinion? So, would it have helped? No. Because I disagree with the desirability of Lui's preferred outcome in the first place.

She corrected me. She explained that when she used the word "helped", she meant whether it would have helped the blogosphere in not being a target of Lui's attack if community moderation had been more active.

Ah, clever girl. Same question in yet another guise.

No, Who cares what Lui thinks? That outcome -– avoiding an admonition from the government -– is of no importance. So why should anyone lift a finger to avoid it?

When that conversation ended, I didn't think I would figure in her story the next day. It would have been too "inconvenient" -– to use a euphemistic Chinese expression -– to quote anything of what I had said.

* * * * *

 
The big surprise the next morning was that the whole angle of the story had changed, or at least, the headline suggested a different angle. Instead of reporting on the digital brushfire, it was now more "constructive" -– highlighting the many ways that webmasters were moderating cyberspeech. See the sidebar at right.

This new tack was a smart one. It would avoid having to report that netizens were overwhelmingly negative about Lui's silly remarks. That would be the kind of bad news that the government-owned media should not be putting on ministers' desks. The amended angle of the story would instead report on a few specific instances where netizens were doing exactly what Lui said they should be doing, thereby demonstrating that Lui was right.

This way, the minister would see good news on his desk and would not shoot the messenger (Medicorp/Today).

On the right, you will see how I have dissected the published story. The anatomy is very interesting, and quite typical of news stories in the mainstream media. The element that is most supportive of the government is placed first, then the factual context is explained. After that, the components are arranged roughly in descending order of support; the more dissenting, the further down the article your view is.

The colour bar helps you see it graphically. Blue indicates a pro-government element, red means the interviewed person disagrees entirely.

However, nowhere does it say that my idea of where justifiable limits should be is far different from the government's.

And still more netizens are blogging about Lui. Even Ephraim Loi, who, I understand, is a friend of Foreign Minister George Yeo, opined that Lui was using "one incident to justify or purport that the self-regulation of the Internet" was ineffective.

"It's as though I'm saying that Rear-Admiral Lui doesn't bother to listen to young Singaporeans because he did not respond to an email which I sent him."

The best commentary that I came across was from Ng E-jay. You should read it. It is Lui Tuck Yew’s admonishment of netizens misses the forest, the trees, and even the overhead bridge.

There was also a letter in the Straits Times forum. Tong Hsien-Hui said "The Government must also understand the communication dynamics in the online world." That's a tall order. Deep down, they still wish that cyberspace can be made to behave as deferentially as our mainstream media. Like the news story dissected above.

© Yawning Bread