Mr Brown, aka Lee Kin Mun, one of Singapore’s pioneer bloggers who remains one of the most popular in the local blogging community, contributed the article ‘S’poreans are fed, up with progress!’ on 30 June 2006 for his weekly column in Today newspaper, a free mainstream daily in Singapore. It highlighted the increase in costs of living – such as electricity tariffs and taxi fares that were introduced after the General Election in 2006.
Subsquently on July 3 2006, K Bhavani, press secretary for the Ministry for Information, Communication and the Arts (MICA) issued a strongly-worded reply to Today in response to Mr Brown’s article. To quote Ms Bhavani (2006): ‘It is not the role of journalists or newspapers in Singapore to champion issues, or campaign for or against the Government. If a columnist presents himself as a non-political observer, while exploiting his access to the mass media to undermine the Government’s standing with the electorate, then he is no longer a constructive critic, but a partisan player in politics’.
On July 6 2006, Mr Brown revealed that his weekly column was suspended by Today.
Minister for MICA, Dr Lee Boon Yang, said on 12 July 2006: ‘Mr Brown’s comment was not posted in his blog. If he had posted the same comment on his blog, we’ll treat it as part of the internet chatter and we would have just let it be! But he didn’t post it – he wrote it and publish it in a mainstream newspaper! That’s the difference!’ (Channel NewsAsia 2006).
Therefore, we see a disturbing dichotomy in opinion regarding the credibility of opinions published online in blogs. As I had discussed in an earlier post, bloggers were charged for seditious remarks; so where do we draw the line as what is merely ‘internet chatter’ and what is considered credible public opinion or civil and rational discourse?
Posted by semiotik 