I refer to the disgusting actions of TODAY newspaper last week, which maliciously misquoted the honourable Mr Low Thia Khiang’s parliamentary tribute speech to the late Mr Lee Kuan Yew. In TODAY’s Facebook post, the paper reported Mr Low as saying “Mr Lee did what was right, but silencing opposition has risked disconnecting Singaporeans from their own society.”
In fact, no where in Mr Low’s speech does he criticise Mr Lee. The truth is that TODAY’s shoddy translation does not even tally with the video recording of Mr Low’s speech. Realising too late about their mistake, TODAY reluctantly posted a half-hearted apology a long time after their first post about Mr Low’s speech and admitted that they had misrepresented Mr Low.
(See www.facebook.com/todayonline/posts/10152826408617572:0. )
However, the damage is already done. Many online PAP supporters use this opportunity to baselessly smear Mr Low Thia Khiang and the Workers’ Party for being disrespectful to the late Mr Lee. It became very obvious who the TODAY Facebook team is siding with when they deleted sensible voices who pointed out TODAY’s mistake or who tried to defend Mr Low.
This sort of behaviour from TODAY is not surprising. Singapore’s government-controlled media is famous throughout the world for having poor reporting standards and no journalistic integrity. This is why government media can’t compete with the new citizen-led social media.
Yet instead of trying to improve themselves, government media has even tried to kill off its competitors. Just recently, The New Paper and the Straits Times conducted an unwarranted witch hunt against the editors of The Real Singapore (TRS), a contributor-based website for the true voices of Singaporeans. Upon learning of the arrest of TRS editors, The New Paper and the Straits Times reported the editors’ full names and splashed their pictures all over the internet and print versions of their newspapers, an act that is usually reserved for convicted criminals. Mind you, this was all done even before a formal court hearing had deemed TRS editors guilty of ANY charges, which they obviously are not.
It is also well known that the current editor-in-chief of TODAY and Mediacorp, Walter Fernandez, is a ball-less bootlicker dog of the PAP government. This is why you can never expect anything of substance from TODAY’s articles, which always censors news that is critical of the government. Unlike previous editors like P N Balji and Mano Subnani, who were chased out of their positions for daring to publish inconvenient truths despite government oppression, Walter is practically a yes-man to the PAP. That is probably why he is able to get away with publishing an illegal election poll during the 2013 Punggol-East by-election without being penalised.
If it is not obvious enough, Walter even sits on the Board of Directors for the Civil Service College, a yes-man training institute if I ever saw one! A man like this probably got his position by sucking up to that gay-looking CEO Shaun Seow in Mediacorp and the PAP government. No wonder TODAY newspaper has been doing poorly.
I highly encourage Mr Low Thia Khiang to take legal action against Walter Fernandez and his team of unprofessional pro-PAP reporters for defaming him and causing grave damage to him and the image of the Workers’ Party. This is a perfect chance for the Worker’s Party to punish the government media for being dishonest in their reporting, and to let Singaporeans know how much “press freedom” they really enjoy under the PAP.
This letter was written by Julian Tan.
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