Among the more admirable traits of Singaporean society is its instinctive deference to institutional integrity. It is a civic reflex.
No one, for instance, demands quarterly KPIs from the judiciary. There are no performance dashboards for the Court of Appeal. We do not rate a High Court judgment by whether it trended on TikTok. The judiciary is understood to serve the public interest, not an algorithm.
It is time we extended the same reverence to another pillar of civic life: The mainstream media.
This weekend, I read that the BBC has shuttered HARDtalk, once a flagship programme known for its tough, unflinching interviews with a remarkable range of guests, from then-Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam to generals, dissidents, and even despots. Across the Atlantic, The Washington Post — the paper that broke Watergate — now appears adrift under an owner who reportedly directed editors to prioritise “personal liberties and free markets.” In protest, the opinion page editor resigned. So too have subscribers.
These are not lapses but symptoms. The scaffolding that once held up serious journalism — cross-subsidised advertising, the prestige of broadsheets, the habit of morning papers — has buckled. In its place: a deluge of influencer hot takes, listicles, rage farming, and AI-generated clickbait. And beneath it all, a broader erosion of trust — not just in traditional media, but in institutions more broadly — with confidence in the press, government, and public life sinking to record lows across the United Kingdom, United States, and beyond.
Mainstream media’s role in Singapore’s high-trust society
Edelman’s 2024 Trust Barometer tells the tale with brutal simplicity. Only 34 percent of Britons and 32 percent of Americans say they trust their media — figures that have fallen by over 10 percentage points in just three years.
Singapore, ever the statistical outlier, is again the exception. Edelman puts trust in traditional media here at 69 percent, more than double the British figure. This may reflect the city-state’s idiosyncrasies: regulatory oversight, public funding, a mainstream media that critics say borders on the obsequious. But the caricature obscures the function.
Take, for instance, the public’s interest in understanding Singapore’s financial reserves. In 2023, CNA launched the “Singapore Reserves Revealed” series, featuring then-Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and then-Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong.
They broke down, in plain and accessible terms, the fiscal philosophy underpinning the nation’s reserves. The series reached over 2.5 million viewers in a country of 5.6 million- a staggering penetration rate.
Similarly, on inflation and cost-of-living pressures, The Straits Times reported that while core inflation receded in late 2024, the lowest-income households still faced high cost pressures — evidence that macroeconomic stability doesn’t trickle down evenly. This data-driven reporting sparked debates that reached Parliament and the public sphere, ensuring that both broad-based and targeted support schemes were part of the national conversation.
Foreign policy, long regarded as the province of elites and mandarins, has been undergoing a democratic turn in Singapore too — brought closer to the public consciousness by the mainstream media.
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In 2024, Lianhe Zaobao ran a compelling series featuring Ambassador-at-Large Chan Heng Chee and other veteran diplomats, dissecting great power rivalry and the shifting geometry of ASEAN’s role in it. Over at CNA, a suite of sharp, plainspoken explainer videos on Singapore’s foreign policy principles amassed over a million views across digital platforms — proof, if any were needed, that the citizenry is leaning into geopolitics with eyes wide open.
Earlier, in 2017, The Straits Times became the stage for a memorable intellectual sparring match between former-Ambassadors Professor Kishore Mahbubani and Bilahari Kausikan — two lions of Singapore’s foreign policy establishment. Mahbubani had argued in an op-ed that small states should behave like small states: Speak softly, pick battles prudently, and invest in the ballast of multilateral institutions.
Kausikan labelled the piece “muddled, mendacious, and dangerous,” insisting that Singapore’s international standing owed more to principled resolve than subordination and meek restraint. That this debate drew rejoinders from senior establishment figures such as then-Foreign Minister Minister K. Shanmugam and former-ASEAN Secretary General Ong Keng Yong only amplified its reach.
I too weighed in with an opinion piece for The Straits Times, arguing that Kishore’s stance was neither one of submission nor passivity, but a considered lesson in how states like Singapore might exercise discretion — a kind of “Machiavellian” finesse — in navigating foreign affairs. What might have remained a cloistered elite disagreement instead evolved into a national conversation.
More recently, in a separate but equally illuminating exchange — once again convened through The Straits Times — Kausikan and Ambassador Professor Tommy Koh clashed over the very foundations of international order. Kausikan, true to his realist instincts, cautioned against romanticising the rules-based order, especially in an age of resurgent great power rivalry. Koh responded in a forum letter published in the Straits Times, defending the UN Charter and ASEAN not as idealistic fictions, but as strategic necessities.
He maintained that international law is not merely aspirational but essential to national security and survival. The exchange was a masterclass in the perennial tension between principle and power — between what states must believe, and what they may be compelled to do amidst what political scientist Professor John Mearsheimer once called “the tragedy of great power politics.”
All this points to an under appreciated truth: Foreign policy discourse in Singapore is alive, contested, and — thanks to platforms like The Straits Times — shaping public understanding for the better. And what better safeguard for sovereignty than a public that trusts and understands the choices made in its interest?
Yet ultimately, the true test of such institutions is not in peacetime, but in crisis. By that measure, Singapore’s mainstream media quietly excelled during the COVID-19 pandemic.
From the earliest days of the outbreak, Singapore’s mainstream outlets became central arteries of public understanding. CNA aired near-daily press briefings live from the Multi-Ministry Taskforce. The Straits Times translated technocratic decisions into comprehensible prose.
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A 2022 study by NTU showed that 77.2 percent of Singaporeans trusted traditional media for pandemic-related information — nearly three times the trust placed in social media (27 per cent). These weren’t just good optics. They delivered results: 95 percent mask compliance. Vaccination rates exceeding 92 percent. Among the best globally.
It wasn’t only about reporting statistics. The media played an active role in countering misinformation, debunking pseudo-scientific theories, and translating the language of virology into vernacular confidence. And when it comes to the outcomes that matter — compliance, calm, cohesion — it clearly outperformed any influencer, algorithm, or AI-generated news aggregator.
Institutions need defending and so does our mainstream media
Which makes recent calls to scrutinise SPH Media’s performance in line with metrics such as editorial quality, diversity of views and digital reach all the more dispiriting.
These proposals, recently raised in Parliament by the Leader of the Opposition, may have been well-intentioned. But the proposed yardsticks suggest a category error.
“Diversity of views,” without editorial discernment, degenerates into a theatre of false equivalence — infectious disease specialists placed alongside anti-vaxxers, lest anyone accuse the newsroom of imbalance. “Digital reach” is a clickbait metric more suited for paid than earned content. Even “editorial quality” is an elusive benchmark. Should editorial judgement and gatekeeping be audited by a focus group or rated with a net promoter score?
To be clear, I believe that publicly funded media must be held accountable – but to standards befitting a civic institution, not a digital marketing campaign. We do not ask the Supreme Court to conduct outreach. We trust it to be rigorous and fair — and when necessary, we stand up for it. Public service journalism deserves the same trust, and the same protection.
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In August 2023, during Singapore’s presidential election campaign, I stood up to defend the mainstream media because the integrity of our civic institutions should not be opportunistically diminished in the theatre of politics. When then-presidential candidate Mr. Tan Kin Lian alleged a “smear campaign” by the press — without evidence, and later, without explanation — it struck at the heart of what sustains Singapore’s high-trust society.
To accuse journalists of collusion with political actors, then quietly withdraw the charge, is not only irresponsible; it risks corroding public confidence in one of the foundations of our democratic infrastructure.
Tan eventually lost the election – though unlike his previous attempt, he retained his campaign deposit. Singapore’s centre may have held, but it remains fragile and must not be taken for granted, especially with a hotly contested general election on the horizon.
According to the Reuters Institute, a significant and growing number of Singaporeans under 35 now turn to influencers and YouTube personalities for political commentary. On Reddit, I’ve observed how anonymous threads are strategically seeded and later amplified by fringe outlets, packaged as the “voice of netizens.”
But this isn’t organic public opinion — it’s astroturfing, dressed up as democratic discourse. A study by MIT researchers underscores the danger: false news spreads “farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth” on Twitter. In fact, they found that false stories were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true ones — and it took true stories about six times longer to reach 1,500 people.
Fortifying the public sphere with quality discourse — not volume
The function of Singapore’s mainstream media is akin to society’s immune system. It identifies misinformation, fights contagion, and enables recovery. Done well, public service journalism doesn’t win arguments. It makes better ones possible. This is realism in an age of institutional drift. For when trust dies, the only thing left to arbitrate public discourse is volume.
Singapore has, thus far, avoided that descent — largely because its broad middle still treats mainstream media with the same seriousness it gives to the courts. Both are arbiters of truth. And both depend on being protected from the corrosive pull of populism.
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