This is not news

I was talk­ing to a friend from who’s back for hol­i­days, and she thanked me for for­ward­ing her the link to Pranay Gupte’s site, say­ing some­thing to the effect of ‘I told­jers! They bugged my phone, seri­ous! And Chan­nel ‘News’ Asia is exactly like that!’

We went on to dis­cuss whether it was office pol­i­tics that brought Mr Gupte’s dis­missal about, and why some­one of his stature would need to stoop so low as to come by our jour­nal­is­tic back­wa­ter to write for a paper as ours, even if it were the best designed news­pa­per in the region. But we agreed that that still wouldn’t strip his alle­ga­tions of any merit. The edi­tors are for­mer (or still are) spooks who can his sto­ries? How exciting.

But whether or not spooks run a paper and can sto­ries writ­ten by award-winning, foreign-talent jour­nal­ists, there’s never such a thing as an objec­tive piece of news. You’ll never know the truth of any mat­ter unless you wuz there and you saw and heard things as they hap­pened. It hap­pens to the most ‘lib­eral’ of coun­tries too (includ­ing that big one with the red states and blue states), but at least they have a vari­ety of pub­li­ca­tions to look at and work out the truth some­where in the mid­dle of the muddle.

As for us, we have to look else­where to find out, ferin­stance, that there is cur­rently a very seri­ous dengue EPIDEMIC in Sin­ga­pore. As of 18th Sep­tem­ber, 5,284 peo­ple have been infected, and at least three peo­ple have died. Not as seri­ous as SARS meh? How come not on front page news every day?

Even if we’re not inter­ested in pol­i­tics and stuff, I’d like to know more about the goings on as regards how the folk up at Parliament=Cabinet=Government decide to do what they do. (And then smack them upside the head when they com­plain of the lack of inter­est in US-Singapore FTA nego­ti­a­tions. Hallo? We din know there was such a thing until it was almost done. Web­site forum also dun have! How to be inter­ested?) Then again, BG George Yeo did reveal in an inter­view some time ago (and which can­not be linked because ST=SPH=Temasek web­sites don’t archive things for online view­ing) how he had sleep­less nights and early morn­ings at the doomed Can­cun trade talks.

(But still nobody asked or wrote about why BG Yeo, friendly chap that he is, and the Min­is­ter for Trade and Indus­try as he was then, got sent to Can­cun while Prof Tommy Koh, Ambas­sador at Large, got to do all the excit­ing FTA work.)

Don’t go out. Got Dengue.