My Singapore friend, SMS, clearly has a faulty TV connection at his house. In fact, right wing Singapore limits what can be shown on TV. Apparently, though, Feaux News does get through to SMS's place. Either that or it's a faulty connection in the gray matter... I dunno.
Singapore TV stations serve up pablum and PAP... that's the PAP party, chief. Controlled news. Good news. You'll never see a piece on China f*cking over the Uighurs because the government wouldn't want to piss off the Chinese... we all make nice and play patty cake like everyone's a grownup at the table, and no one is trying to steal Southeast Asia for themselves.
So... we've got MediaCorp... nominally, an independent corporation, but, surprise, surprise, Mediacorp is 100 percent owned by Temasek Holdings, the state controlled and run investment fund. Now, you may think me crazy for suggesting that a government run, 100 percent owner of a media company would want to influence news, and bob's your uncle, too. But guess what? We've got a Ministry of Culture to handle those chores.
Mediacorp doesn't run a story on grass growing in the median on Bukit Timah without getting the A-OK from the Ministry of Culture to make sure that no one is offended by the growing grass being reported as an inch too tall... you might piss off the Ministry of Lawn Mowing and we can't have that. Mediacorp and SPH will run stories all day long about how much a COE costs but will never, ever question the government policies that cause the COE prices to rise so high.
Medicorp runs all the TV stations in Singapore (so, you can run on over to Adam Road and talk to all of them at once, and a handful of radio stations as well), and Singapore Press Holdings has a minority interest in a couple of stations... but they don't call the SPH daily newspaper "the birdcage liner" because it produces hard hitting journalism, any more than the drivel that appears on TV could be called news. All the news that's fit to parrot, so long as it's all happy times and green grass... growing at just the right height, and part of an imaginative and far thinking government program.
God forbid that any real news should be run about the rampant corruption in Malaysia and Indonesia, except when a Singapore bank gets caught with its hand in the till. Singapore gets too much of its stuff from these countries to piss off the corrupt who run these countries, and we never, ever, never, would want to comment on the internal affairs of another country... because... shit... they might start commenting on our internal affairs and we can't have that.
And you know the thick, heavy smoke that envelopes Singapore every year because of the uncontrolled burning of rain forest in Indonesia? Every year we get the stories of how thick it is and how it's going to get better. And you know what we don't ever get? The names of the people who own the land who keep setting this shit on fire. And why is that? Because the Singapore gahmen doesn't want to piss off a bunch of powerful and corrupt people in Indonesia, people who could make life difficult for the power players in Singapore. Yes, Singapore has lots of power players, and the gahmen serves the will of the people... the question is: Which people?
So... listen... if your consulting gig includes showing people how to dig a hole in the sand so that they can insert their head and then cover it up and commune with the sand crabs, or maybe how to lube your head from the neck up so that you can stick it so far up your ass that you see neither sunshine nor news, or perhaps, if you can advise as to how to look in all 360 degree directions and see nothing, then I expect your services are going to be in high demand.
Here's a hint: Foreign news sources have had their asses dragged all over the coals because of their reporting. Reuters and the International Herald Tribune are the ones I am most familiar with. Perish the thought that a news piece critical of the Singapore government should ever see the light of day... we'll cut you out of the market entirely... because, guess what? The gahmen also controls the switch on every last bit of data that flows in and out of Singapore.
