On February 8, 2007, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) Media Report discussed the changing media environment in Singapore. Antony Funnell, presenter for the Media Report, interviewed Sinapai Samydorai, president of Think Centre and Dr Cherian George, academic and journalist, who is currently an assistant professor at the Nanyang Technological University.
Samydorai is one of Singapore’s few dissenting voices and has been given limited opportunity by the mainstream media to air his views; in the interview he speaks of the difficulties and obstacles that alternative opinions to the government status quo, such as his and of opposition party members like J.B Jeyaratnam and Dr Chee Soon Juan, have to go through in order to be heard.
On the other hand, George’s outlook on the media environment is considerably more optimistic; while he states that ‘the mainstream media is quite closely supervised by the government… which believes that the media should support the government agenda and… not reflect what it considers more extreme views’, the general lack of restrictions on the Internet provides people with the opportunity and an appropriate avenue to engage in serious political discourse or dissent.
With this kind of freedom of opinion that we have on the Internet, it is important that we through this alternative media also exercise responsibility and credibility in discussion or dissent. As George concludes in the interview: ‘These alternative media are now the most hospitable venues for nation-building, because that’s where you find citizens coming together, thinking about what’s good for the community, and in many, many different fields, from the environment to heritage and so on, are trying to build something and trying to bring communities together’.
Posted by semiotik 