Sniffing out the Straits Times agenda in the AWARE Saga

Sniffing out the Straits Times agenda in the AWARE Saga

A lot has been said about the gays, the anti-gays, the new guard, the old guard in the recent AWARE debacle, but as the ashes of the debate begin to cool, one guilty party escapes from the scrutiny. That party is the Straits Times, especially its senior reporters Wong Kim Hoh and Zakir Hussain.

Before Wong Kim Hoh’s article on the new EXCO on 10 April, my knowledge of AWARE was a small but rather active pro-women group who did one talk in my school (the talk was excellent BTW, the topic was how to help abused women). That’s why when I was surprised to see them grab not the forum section, nor the headlines of the home section, not even the sidebar of the Prime Section, but the Prime Page.

My surprise slowly grew into suspicion when not only did ST’s coverage continue with the weeks, but it did so with a tenacity of purpose (come on, even our GENERAL ELECTIONS don’t get this much attention). In fact, at one point, I could barely tell the difference between the ST and the New Paper because of the kind of headlines that were being published — “UNKNOWNS KNOCK OUT VETERANS”, “COUP LEADER COMES OPEN”,”THE FEMINIST MENTOR”, “AWARE SHOWDOWN”, and the fire they were feeding in the Forums. Before this, they were a pro-women’s rights group with a 30-strong membership nestled somewhere in the Dover heartland. Now, they were being portrayed as the all-important civil society group, whose leadership takeover had apocalyptic consequences that would rattle the foundations of Singapore.

Understand that even though your reporting is factual, you can still be biased. By choosing to give the issue so much attention (especially on print where there’s no diversity of information like online sources), and selectively choosing the kind of stories published, you polarise the issue and force people to take sides. What the ST did was not factual reporting but a deliberate, systematic attempt to provoke a public response.

With my limited knowledge, here are some suggestions as to why ST chose to do this:

1) Increase ailing readership. AWARE was always going to be a juicy issue, guaranteed to draw readership. Maybe ST felt threatened by the emergence of other media, and decided to cover an issue that would grab attention again.

2) Government agenda. Maybe somebody in Gov Inc. didn’t like COOS over-stepping their boundaries, and gave the press rein to expose their act.

3) There was really nothing else interesting deserving ST’s attention on those days. Uh… right.

-and, finally, the most controversial of them all-

4) Wong Kim Hoh / Zakir Hussain has a pro-gay agenda. These two senior writers did a lot of the reports, including the three-page feature on Dr. Thio, the no. 1 enemy of the gay community right now. Kim Hoh has written this article, which clearly reveals his sympathies, so perhaps he thought exposing the coup would create momentum against the New Guard that would force them out. I have sources that also point that during his coverage of the EGM, he was seen associating with the pro-gay crowds.

Now, if Mr. Wong is gay, or harbors sympathies towards the gay community, I have no issue with that. My issue is that assuming my guess is true, what you did was a breach of professionalism as a senior writer of the ST. Save your opinions for your blog, at most, and keep your reporting balanced please.

On the other hand, some of you may laud the ST for doing such a comprehensive coverage of the AWARE saga, because if they hadn’t, maybe Josie and her pussycats would never have been ousted out. Some may even see the coverage as important as it helped to facilitate a triumph of civil/secular society over a “fundamentalist” Christian group.

Well, while this may be so, what I really see was a press that behaved irresponsibly because what they did wasn’t reporting, but public provocation.

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