“Shut up and take my money” – narrating state funding, independent journalism, and public trust in Singapore

In May 2021, Singapore Press Holding (SPH), the country’s newspaper conglomerate, announced its restructuring into a not-for-profit entity in response to the global decline of the news industry. The government pledged an annual S$180m budget to the new SPH Media Trust (SMT), raising concerns about the ability of the news entity to break away from government control, but these were dismissed with political assertions that editorial independence had ‘always existed’. This paper analyses the government-led public discourses surrounding SMT, highlighting a two-prong narrative approach: obfuscate the social role of the media in Singapore, and downplay the need for accountability over public funding for SMT. Applying a Foucauldian framework for evaluating discursive practices in governance and measuring these narratives against public service journalism scholarship, this paper probes the constructed determinants of journalism’s social role in Singapore. It proposes that similar evaluations can be applied to discourse about journalism in other societies.

Details

Title: “Shut up and take my money” – narrating state funding, independent journalism, and public trust in Singapore
Authors/Creators: Howard Lee - Murdoch University, School of Media and Communication
Publication Details: Communication Research and Practice
Publisher: Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Identifiers: 991005656370307891
Murdoch Affiliation: School of Media and Communication
Resource Type: Journal article

Metrics

463 File views/ downloads

77 Record Views

1 Times Cited - Web of Science