How Do You Know When You’ve Got it Right?

 

One of the things that we tend to forget in our current “polarized” world, is the fact that “balance” and objectivity are supposed to be the Holy Grail of good journalism. A journalist is not supposed to take sides when reporting the news and even when he or she writes an opinion piece, there is supposed to be a certain amount of objectivity involved (ie, although my opinion is x,y,or z, I’ve only reached this opinion by coming to a,b and c facts).

I grew up in a part of England where your social status was pretty judged by the newspaper you read. Hence, when a business partner’s former employee mentioned that a former supervisor was a white Englishman who read the Daily Mail and talked a lot about the good old days when the White Expats ran the show, I just rolled my eyes and said that he couldn’t be anyone’s superior because, well he was a Daily Mail reader.

To be fair to the Daily Mail, it is what you can call the paper read by the people who are married to the people who run the country. Sure, the Mail wasn’t something that you’d take pride in being known to read. However, it wasn’t something that would make you cringe if your friends saw you with a copy.

That label was reserved for the Sun, which remains the top selling paper in the UK. The process of creating the Sun is masterful. However, it wasn’t a paper that people who took pride in having a year or two of former schooling would want to be seen reading. The old joke says that people read the Sun, don’t care as long as there are tits on page three (back when page-three of the Sun featured a topless girl). To put it crudely, the news that the average Sun reader was focused on was the pair on page three.

What made the difference between the “intelligent” papers like the Times, Telegraph, Financial Time and the Guardian and the “plebs” paper like the Sun, Daily Sport and News of the World? The answer was in headlines. The headline of the first group were inevitably more toned down. Even if there was a different political slant (Telegraph is proudly conservative and the Guardian is intellectually to the left), the political bias reflected by the paper was always subtle.

There is no pretense of objectivity when it comes to writing headlines for the second group. The slant of the paper is inevitably obvious. A sample of the Sun’s headlines can be seen below:

 

Copyright – The Sun.

Leaving aside whatever biases and snobbery that I have, it’s the second group that actually wins elections. The most famous example was in the 1992 General Election which was barely won by John Major, who had spent most of the election trailing in the polls. After the election, the Sun made its role in the Conservative party election quite clear:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_The_Sun_Wot_Won_It#:~:text=%22It's%20The%20Sun%20Wot%20Won,become%20a%20British%20political%20catchphrase.

 

 

This was something that the opposition became aware of and prior to his landslide victory in 1997, Tony Blair made it a point to court the Sun’s owner, Rupert Murdoch into ensuring that the Sun switched over to Mr. Blair’s “New Labour.”

The role of the Sun in the British election process is merely an example of the role that the media can play in the political process. In his book, “From Third World to First,” Mr. Lee Kuan Yew made it very clear that the media would always be subservient to him. There would never be a version of Rupert Murdoch coming out of Singapore. Mr. Lee’s classic line with the media would always be “Who Elected You?”

Generally speaking, Singapore’s media has given the veneer of being like the British Broadsheets. There’s never been room for sensationalizing headlines in the way that happen in the British Tabloid edition. The New Paper, our original tabloid did cover a few interesting stories like the one I was quoted in below, but nothing came close to the stuff that the Sun comes up with:

https://www.asiaone.com/News/Latest%2BNews/Singapore/Story/A1Story20120531-349614.html

However, the problem that many journalists found was that, the “subtle” slant in the Singapore mainstream was never really subtle. Editors in Singapore have been trained to be “responsible,” and news, as Lee Kuan Yew fully intended it to, was designed to serve the national agenda (which if you work on the premise that he was the government ……)

Then, when “online” media came into being, there was the other extreme and government was officially branded as something to be “wacked” as often as possible.  

My own journey as a published writer has been about trying to ride between these two forces. In my early days in public relations (PR) one had to be exceedingly careful about not offending editors and, incidentally, the first paper to publish me was Today, which at the time was considered an “opposition” paper because Singapore Press Holdings didn’t own it. The key to getting published was to be questioning enough to be interesting but not to an extent that the editors would not want you near them.

Then, as more of my writing ended up being my own blog, I had a bit more freedom to express myself (since I am the final arbitrator of what goes onto the blog). Never thought much of the blog until one day I noticed that people were reading and then larger websites like TRemeritus and Independent Singapore started picking up my pieces.

As I wrote more and got published more, I had two surprises. One was branding or at least the type that raises a few eye brows. I remember someone who was trying to start a newspaper saying that his biggest worry about engaging me was the fact that I was known as a “political writer.” That was astounding to me. I didn’t know that I was known at all. Interestingly enough, I would have a similar conversation with a potential client who thought me of as being “anti-establishment.”

Interestingly enough, I developed a peculiar fan base on TRemeritus, which claims to be the opposite of the mainstream. However, this time, I wasn’t known as a “political writer,” but as a troll from the ruling party’s internet brigade. My favourite young Muslim politician who grew up as PAP groupie takes delight in calling me up to tell me about all the funny accusations against me from the online crowd, claiming that my ability to give b***j*** in the ruling party had brought me a substantial fortune (which would be OK as accusations go if I actually had a substantial fortune and didn’t need to ask people for money).

Being “branded” by these parties has been educational. It makes you understand that if you are in “nobody’s camp” in a known way, chances are you are not going to have any friends.

More importantly, you find that basic objectivity is going to be offensive to somebody or other and in a day and age of the internet, they’re bound to let you know.

The third point is that, if you want to have your name in the public, you’re going to have to expect people to take issue with you. If you don’t like people taking issue with you, you have no business being in the public.

Generally speaking, I guess I must have hit the right balance of being pro and anti-establishment when I get branded for belonging to the other party. I take joy in the fact that in same part of cyberspace, I get scolded and praised as I did when TRemeritus picked up my piece on God-Kings.