“Shut up and take my money” – narrating state funding, independent journalism, and public trust in Singapore

Abstract

ABSTRACT In May 2021, Singapore Press Holding (SPH), the country’s newspaper conglomerate, announced its restructuring into a not-for-profit entity in response to the global decline of the news industry. The government pledged an annual S$180m budget to the new SPH Media Trust (SMT), raising concerns about the ability of the news entity to break away from government control, but these were dismissed with political assertions that editorial independence had ‘always existed’. This paper analyses the government-led public discourses surrounding SMT, highlighting a two-prong narrative approach: obfuscate the social role of the media in Singapore, and downplay the need for accountability over public funding for SMT. Applying a Foucauldian framework for evaluating discursive practices in governance and measuring these narratives against public service journalism scholarship, this paper probes the constructed determinants of journalism’s social role in Singapore. It proposes that similar evaluations can be applied to discourse about journalism in other societies.