Utopia Offline, Dystopia Online: Two Sides of Nation-Building Journalism in Singapore

Abstract

Singapore has espoused the nation-building, developmental model of journalism since independence. It has made its national media a byword for compliance with the government, and often frames articles to show the nation in a better light. The other side of this is that blogs and news websites react against these constraints imposed on the mainstream media and may be assumed to swing to another extreme, showing the island in a worse light. As a result, the mainstream print media of Singapore is characterised by its upbeat, positive spin on government-related stories—creating the image of a utopia in the readers’ minds. Blogs and unofficial online news websites, by contrast, tend to be characterised by a negative, bleak outlook that might create in the mind of the reader the idea that the country is a dystopia. The assumption would be that a controlled media would be less democratic than an uncontrolled cyberspace. That may not be the case. This study compares print and online coverage of the escape of terrorism suspect Mas Selamat from custody in 2008. It found that while the print media paints a generally rosy picture of Singapore’s efforts to apprehend the escapee, it does not shy away from asking difficult questions that could embarrass the government. At the same time, the online coverage was not universally critical of the authorities, it can be said to show some hallmarks of developmental journalism. The utopia is not as perfect as expected, nor is the dystopia quite so dark. Both kinds of media may be considered to reflect a broader social consensus of what is important in news coverage, and in different ways show a different side of the media-democracy relationship in Singapore.