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CREDIBILITY DEFICITS: WHY SOME NEWS MEDIA DON'T PAY THE PRICE
CHERIAN GEORGE, PhD
School of Communication & Information
Nanyang Technological University
31 Nanyang Link
Republic of Singapore (637718)
Tel: +65-67906453
Fax: +65-67924329
Email: [log in to unmask]
Abstract
Conventional wisdom suggests that journalism benefits from the
self-righting principle, such that newspapers that lack credibility
will eventually fail in the marketplace of ideas. However, in some
political contexts, newspapers may continue to thrive despite
authoritarian controls, at the expense of more independent media. The
case of Singapore illustrates this paradox, and suggests that astute
authoritarian control of the press can subvert the self-righting
principle, enabling unfree media to endure chronic credibility deficits.
Submitted to the International Communication Division, AEJMC 2005 Convention
CREDIBILITY DEFICITS: WHY SOME NEWS MEDIA DON'T PAY THE PRICE
Abstract
Conventional wisdom suggests that journalism benefits from the
self-righting principle, such that newspapers that lack credibility
will eventually fail in the marketplace of ideas. However, in some
political contexts, newspapers may continue to thrive despite
authoritarian controls, at the expense of more independent media. The
case of Singapore illustrates this paradox, and suggests that astute
authoritarian control of the press can subvert the self-righting
principle, enabling unfree media to endure chronic credibility deficits.
CREDIBILITY DEFICITS: WHY SOME NEWS MEDIA DON'T PAY THE PRICE
In debates about press freedom, it is often taken as an article of
faith that, ultimately, truth will prevail. It is believed that
unfree media are unsustainable, because it is impossible to insulate
a society totally from counter-discourses, even in authoritarian
regimes. Through the cracks, information and ideas will seep that
throw the credibility of the media into question. And, without
credibility, media will wither. This is the self-righting or
marketplace principle: the belief that good media will ultimately
drive out bad. Obviously, marketplace forces are thwarted in
societies where alternative sources are censored by repressive
governments, allowing propaganda media to dominate. However, thanks
in part to new information and communication technologies, complete
monopolisation by government media is rare. The norm, even in
authoritarian societies such as China, is that citizens can, if
sufficiently motivated, access diverse sources of news (see, for
example, Kalathil and Boas, 2003). From a democratic perspective, the
hope is that the self-righting principle will kick in: the truth,
even if purveyed by media that are relatively small and weak, will
displace government-controlled media. Thus, as satellite television
and the internet emerged, there were those who predicted a decade ago
that "it looks increasingly certain that politically guided media
systems will lose their relevance in view of the diverse and quality
information available as a result of continuous advances in the
technology of information" (Rampal, 1995: 161).
This paper considers a more pessimistic possibility that needs to be
worked into theory building. Based on a case study of Singapore, a
semi-authoritarian city-state in South-east Asia, it argues that
state-controlled media can be managed in such a way that they remain
resilient against the cruder predictions of the self-righting theory.
Counter to intuition, news media that lack credibility may endure and
even prosper. It is not suggested here that the Singapore situation
represents the norm. There are numerous examples of how propaganda
media have paid the price after disregarding the crucial importance
of credibility. Ratings of the news broadcasts of Doordarshan,
India's government-run television work, sank in the late 1980s when
satellite TV provided viewers with more options. The circulation of
Malaysia's government-controlled newspapers plummeted when lost
patience with their one-sided coverage of the political crisis of the
late 1990s. The Singapore case may be an exception. However, it is a
theoretically significant one, suggesting that astute management by
the state can confound simplistic predictions about the marketplace of ideas.
Credibility and the press
Research interest in the issue of credibility escalated in the 1980s,
when diminished credibility came to be cited within the industry as a
possible contributory factor to declining newspaper penetration in
the United States. However, analysing the results of four industry
surveys carried out in 1985, Gaziano (1988) concluded that there was
no "crisis of public confidence" in the media, although there were
certainly areas of concern, such as public unhappiness over the
media's tendency to emphasise bad news and their apparent lack of
concern for ordinary people who are reported on. Similarly, Robinson
and Kohut (1988) refuted the prevailing view that the American press
was in a credibility crisis. They argued that such conclusions were
based on studies that adopted a broad definition of credibility, to
include such factors as the conduct of reporters in the field. Most
surveys had also asked respondents about news forms in general,
rather than specific news organisations. Focusing specifically on the
believability of specific news organisations, Robinson and Kohut
found that "there is no believability crisis for the press". While
the public had reservations about some press techniques, "the clear
majority of the public considers the press believable and considers
specific, mainline sources as substantially more believable than 'the
press' in general" (p.188).
The debate helped to refine the concept of credibility. Meyer (1988)
noted that, in addition to striving for believability, some newspaper
editors had pointed out that newspapers also needed to maintain their
leadership status within their communities. Thus, Meyer argues for
credibility to be analysed along two independent dimensions,
believability and community affiliation. The believability index
comprises factors such as fairness, lack of bias, and accuracy. The
community affiliation index incorporates readers' perception of
whether the newspaper watches out after their interests, is concerned
about their community's well-being, is patriotic, and is concerned
mainly about the public interest. Explaining why believability is not
enough, he noted: "A newspaper can be believed but still be alienated
if it advocates positions strongly opposed by a majority in its
community or undertakes investigations or editorial positions than
run counter to the perceived economic or social interests of the
community" (p.567).
The underlying concern behind much of such research is that the
media's positive democratic role may be thwarted by image problems
most of the time, the media should be believed, but they are not
because of professional practices or editorial positions that their
readers do not like. This presumption is revealed in Gaziano's
statement that credibility is an important issue to study because the
nation's ability to inform the public is severely hampered by "the
public inability to believe the news media" (1988: 267) as if the
fault lies with the public and not the media. Similarly, it is
interesting to note that while Meyer argues that believability and
community affiliation are independent dimensions of credibility with
a potential orthogonal relationship, he illustrates this with the
case of a newspaper with high believability and low community
affiliation. The converse possibility that strong community
affiliation could compensate for low believability is not
discussed. Yet, it is precisely such possibilities that need to be
explored in the context of unfree societies, where there is good
reason to doubt the believability of news media.
Instead, by and large, the notion that lack of credibility will
undermine a state-controlled newspaper has been treated as axiomatic
rather than as one that deserves closer scrutiny. At least one US
study casts doubt on the theory that media credibility is positively
correlated with media use. Rimmer and Weaver (1987) suggest that the
relationship is stronger when the measure of media use is an
affective or attitudinal one, such as preference. Sheer frequency of
media use a behavioural rather than attitudinal measure is not
generally correlated with how credible the media are perceived to be.
"These patterns imply that increases or decreases in a medium's
perceived credibility will probably not result in increases or
decreases in readership of viewership as some editors and news
directors have suggested" (Rimmer & Weaver, 1987: 36). To put it
simply, lack of credibility may reduce the likeability of a medium
without damaging its sales. Singapore appears to be an example of
this pattern. It is a case that needs investigation and explanation
if we are to extend our understanding of the press, politics and the
public in more authoritarian regimes.
Singapore and its press system
Singapore is a city-state of four million. It has a parliamentary
system with regular general elections, won with equal regularity by
the People's Action Party (PAP). Since independence in 1965, the PAP
government has held that the press and other influential
institutions, such as trade unions and universities, must be
subordinate to agenda of the country's elected leaders (Mauzy &
Milne, 2002; George, 2002). All but one of Singapore's daily
newspapers are published by the publicly listed Singapore Press
Holdings. The one newspaper outside this stable is published by
government-owned Media Corporation of Singapore.
The press system is maintained in part by watertight legal controls,
which operate at two levels. The first is made up of a panoply of
licensing and national security laws. Press laws inherited from the
British colonial period require all newspapers to be licensed;
licences can be revoked at any time. Journalists must also beware the
Internal Security Act, under which they can be detained without
trial. They can be fined or jailed for contempt of court or contempt
of parliament. The Official Secrets Act deters them from being on the
receiving end of leaks. Libel laws compel writers to take extreme
care with any comments that could be claimed to hurt officials'
reputations the courts have not adopted the United States' practice
of giving less protection to public figures in the interest of
allowing public debate.
The government wielded these punitive powers most aggressively in the
early 1970s, when a handful of newspapers were forced to close, and
several pressmen arrested under the Internal Security Act (Seow,
1998). If this first level of legal control is public and somewhat
messy, the second is more subtle and behind-the-scenes. Introduced
through the Newspaper and Printing Presses Act of 1974, it empowers
the government to determine the composition of a newspaper company's
board of directors, without the need to take over ownership. Under
the law, newspaper companies must be locally-owned public companies,
and their shares divided into ordinary shares and management shares.
The government can dictate who holds management shares, which ensures
that newspaper boards comprise establishment figures with no interest
in upsetting the political status quo. This in turn guarantees that
only politically-trustworthy journalists are appointed to senior
gatekeeping positions (George, 2002).
Credibility deficit
Not surprisingly, the national media in Singapore suffer from a
chronic credibility deficit. Much of the evidence of this is
anecdotal, but even individuals close to the government have
acknowledged the problem. A member of parliament from the ruling
party has written that The Straits Times' most important challenge is
to improve its credibility with its readers: "It is a fact that the
ST suffers from an image and credibility problem
The ST also appears
to be less well thought of than many regional newspapers. The ST's
problem is that it is too often perceived simplistically as a
mouthpiece of the Government" (Shanmugam, 1995).
One of the few studies on media credibility in Singapore supports
this claim (Kuo, Holaday & Peck, 1993). In the survey of 434 voters
immediately after the 1991 general election, 26% said that newspaper
reports were "not fair", while 40% rated them "fair"; 22% said they
were "not complete", while 53% found them "complete". Respondents
with post-secondary qualifications were much more likely to perceive
unfairness (38%) and incompleteness (28%). Not surprisingly,
opposition voters were especially of the view that newspaper reports
were unfair (63%) and not complete (45%). In a 1996 survey of 1,535
Singaporeans, 23% agreed that newspaper reports could be trusted,
with 14% disagreeing and 53% non-committal. Among degree-holders, the
proportion who agreed that newspaper reports could be trusted fell to
14% (Tan, Wirtz et al, 2001).
That being the case, one would expect Singapore's national media to
be vulnerable to competitors that are more politically independent.
Of course, all media in Singapore are subject to some political
pressure. Foreign publications such as The Asian Wall Street Journal
and The Economist fall under the ambit of a section of the NPPA that
prohibits interference in the domestic politics of Singapore (Seow,
1998). A publication that refuses to give the Singapore government
the unedited right of reply is deemed to be playing politics and can
have a quota imposed on its circulation. Almost all of the major
regional and international news publications have at one time or
another fallen foul of this law. Significantly, the government has
strenuously denied that these moves are intended to deny Singaporeans
access to a free flow of ideas. The point, it says, is to impose a
financial cost, via lost advertising revenue, on foreign publications
that it believes are acting irresponsibly. To add credence to this
claim, it has gone so far as to permit the local reproduction of
affected magazines minus the advertising so that Singaporeans can
continue to read them despite the quotas. It has to be said that
these moves are less draconian than those taken by several other
governments, which, for example, regularly resort to banning foreign
journalists and their publications entirely. Still, the Singapore
government's actions appear to have had a chilling effect on the
foreign media, reducing the gap between their version of Singapore
affairs and that of the national media. Furthermore, the foreign
media, including the dozens with correspondents in Singapore, are
generally uninterested in sustained and in-depth reporting on
Singapore politics focusing instead on market news and events in
neighbouring countries. It is therefore not too surprising that the
relatively more critical foreign media have not adversely affected
Singapore media's hold on local audiences.
More puzzling is the lack of the impact of independent websites and
email lists that have emerged since the mid-1990s. These exploit a
loophole in the government's media policies. The internet is the only
medium for which mass communicators do not need to obtain a
government licence. Singapore-based websites deemed as political or
religious in orientation need to register with the authorities, to
ensure accountability for online publication, but there has been no
case of prior restraint exercised against any such site. Although the
government has the legal and technical means to block any site it
wishes thanks to the proxy servers through which all internet
service providers are required to route traffic in practice only a
symbolic list of 100 pornographic sites have been blocked since these
rules came into effect in 1996. Internet communicators must still
contend with all the other laws that apply to print and broadcast
media, such as libel and contempt of court. However, since
discretionary licensing has been the main means of ensuring that the
mass media are conservatively run, the absence of such licensing laws
and the location of some sites outside of Singapore's jurisdiction
allows significantly greater freedom of expression on the internet
(George, 2003).
Online projects that have been highly critical of the government
and the mainstream press include Think Centre
(www.thinkcentre.org), The Optical (sg.geocities.com/theoptical/),
Singaporeans For Democracy (www.sfdonline.org), Singapore Window
(www.singapore-window.org) and Fateha (now defunct). A satirical site
with biting observations on politics and politicians, Talkingcock
(www.talkingcock.com), claims a subscribership in the tens of
thusands. Popular blogs include Mr Brown (www.mrbrown.com), aimed at
"documenting the dysfunctional side of Singapore life". Some
opposition political parties also use the internet actively (Ho,
Zaher & Habibul, 2002). All these sites are small and amateur-run,
lacking the resources for investigative journalism or even daily
updates. Most claim to be read by a few thousand people at most. This
is unlikely to be because Singaporeans fear visiting them, as there
is no precedent of individuals being victimised for consuming
alternative political content controls are largely at the
production end, rather than directed against consumption. The
question remains, then, why these sites have not grown their
audiences, at the expense of the credibility-deficient mainstream
media. Singapore's neighbour, Malaysia, experienced just that.
Malaysia has a similar media system, with government-controlled
national media and websites that are free of prior restraint though
constantly fearful of post-publication punishment. In the late 1990s,
the leading independent political sites drew as many as 100,000
readers, while the circulations of some mainstream newspapers
plummeted by as much as one-third as readers tired of one-sided,
pro-government reporting of political controversies.
In Singapore, in contrast, there has been no evidence of the
mainstream press losing readers to the insurgent online media,
despite failing to fulfil what, according to democratic theorists, is
their basic role. Nor again unlike Malaysia have consumers
organised any effective boycotts, even during election periods, when
frustration with the press tends to peak. According to AC Nielsen,
readership of Singapore newspapers has climbed steadily. Readership
of SPH's English-language newspapers rose from under 1.4 million in
1994 to around 1.7 million in 2003. Growth has slowed since 2000,
mainly as a result of the arrival of Mediacorp's competing free
newspaper, Today, which claims a growing readership despite being
100-percent government-owned. SPH's after-tax profit has more than
doubled in the past decade, exceeding S$350 million in 2003
(Singapore Press Holdings, 2003).
Compensating factors
There may be a number of factors that combine to make a credibility
deficit more tolerable to audiences and less punishing for the media
concerned. Studying the Singapore case in closer detail, five
possible factors are suggested here.
1. Predictable bias
It is usually assumed that bias undermines the credibility of news
media. However, certain types or patterns of bias may be less
damaging than others. Bias that is unpredictable places readers on
shaky ground, unable to discern which stories can and cannot be
believed. In contrast, if a newspaper's bias is systematic applying
to certain categories of coverage, and in predictable directions it
becomes fairly simple for regular readers to read around that bias.
The press in Singapore falls squarely in this latter category. All of
the mainstream media are least credible when covering political news.
The public knows that, in general, criticism of government policy
will be muted, that direct criticism of leaders will be rare, and
that their speeches and statements are given more space and
prominence than they are worth journalistically. With this knowledge,
readers have developed a knack for reading between the lines. Lack of
credibility that arises from predictable bias, in other words, may
not a sufficiently large flaw to negate completely a newspaper's
usefulness. The point can be expressed in Donald Rumsfeld's classic
epistemological terms. The Straits Times reader knows what he knows,
and also because the paper's biases are predictable knows what he
doesn't know. It may be only when news media overwhelm us with the
sense that we don't know what we don't know the unknown unknowns
that their credibility deficit becomes a serious problem.
2. General reliability
If biases are limited to certain categories of coverage, it may still
be possible for a newspaper to develop a positive reputation as a
generally reliable news source. The member of parliament quoted above
argued for precisely this duality. The Singapore system, he noted,
precludes the press from taking up political causes or trying to
engage the government as an independent player. Nor can the media
challenge those political limits: "The press knows what the response
from the Government will be. This is a Government which has a full
armoury of governmental power at its disposal and the determination
to use such power, secure in the knowledge that it has solid
electoral support for its policies." However, the press still has to
decide how to perform its function within the limits drawn for it.
Within their operating environment, newspapers can still aim to
develop "a sound reputation for integrity" (Shanmugam, 1995). This
indeed appears to be the tack taken by The Straits Times and other
national media. For most of its coverage, readers can count on the
Singapore media to present generally accurate, informative and
thorough reports of the news. At a day-to-day, operational level, the
press in Singapore is fairly professional. Accuracy is treated
seriously and factual errors are promptly corrected. In-depth,
investigative journalism is rare, but by and large, Singaporeans'
informational needs are met. The media also carry a wide range of
opinion on most subjects.
3. Political parallelism
Political parallelism is a term used by Hallin and Mancini (2004) to
describe the degree to which the structure of a country's media
system mirrors the political structure. Applying the concept to the
present context, it could be argued that credibility deficits are
most costly when political parallelism is low. This can be
illustrated by looking again at Singapore's closest neighbour.
Malaysia's news media suffered for their monolithically
pro-government editorial stand when the political system was at its
most fractured, with strong opposition parties and a vociferous
political reform movement. The media's one-sided political coverage
contrasted starkly with the in-your-face daily reality of political
contestation. In Singapore, on the other hand, the PAP-dominated
media system parallels Singapore's political system: the government
is the dominant voice in the media, but it is also the dominant voice
outside of the media. The volume of government news is thus a
reasonable reflection of the government's importance as a newsmaker
in shaping the daily lives of Singaporeans. Conversely, the absence
of opposition stories on most days is partly due to
politically-induced self-censorship, but also partly in line with the
level of inactivity of the opposition. Of course, one reason for that
inactivity is government control. There are real barriers to
mobilising opposition or civil society in Singapore. However, that
itself is another dimension of the high degree of political
parallelism. The muting of alternative and dissenting voices in the
media is not an anomaly unique to the media, but is just one part of
a more general Singapore condition in which other potential sources
of dissent such as the universities, trade unions and civil society
organisations are also kept under control and also suffer their own
credibility problems. Therefore, the press, in the eyes of more
critical Singaporeans, does not stick out like a sore thumb.
4. Calibrated coercion
While state control is ubiquitous, it is not absolute or brutal. This
is one of the lesser-appreciated skills of the PAP government: its
application of what can be called calibrated coercion. The government
has at its disposal a wide array of coercive powers to deal with the
media. In recent years it appears to have learnt how to achieve more
with less. This is not to say that it has given up any of its
coercive tools, but that it appreciates the merits of strategic
self-restraint. A senior editor, explaining the press system in
Singapore, has observed that "excessive use of its reserve powers by
the government" may be counter-productive. Writing in 1981, he said
that "government interference [through] telephone calls to editors to
influence treatment of news or to reprimand" had become less
frequent. "And even then, there is a greater willingness to listen to
and sometimes accept an alternative view" (Cheong, 1981:29). Faced
with a more sophisticated electorate and the need to build political
capital, the political leadership knows it needs credible mass media.
Despite a history of poor government-press relations, he added, the
government "does not want a docile press; indeed, it has made it
widely known that it wants a livelier, more credible press with high
professional standards" (p.28).
Officials seem to understand what some political theorists say about
hegemony that states have to preserve a certain margin for free
choice, because only then can they achieve ideological domination,
which is ultimately more enduring that total control through the
physical force (Hall, 1982). Accordingly, journalists in Singapore
are given some leeway to criticise, to provide a vent for popular
opinion, and to apply professional standards to their work. This in
turn has made it easier for news organisations to recruit staff of
reasonably high quality, and to achieve a level of professionalism
that partly compensates for their credibility deficit. Thus, one
short answer to why Singapore's Straits Times has not seen
circulation declines that Malaysia's New Straits Times has is that
the Singapore paper is less propagandistic than its Malaysian
counterpart or at least it is more intelligently and subtly
propagandistic. This is not to cast aspersions on the abilities of
Malaysian journalists, but rather to argue that the Singapore leaders
are more adept at calibrated coercion than the Malaysian government.
5. Spin role
Closely related to previous point is the kind of support that the
government demands of the media. Note that there are different
degrees of propaganda. At one extreme, propaganda is a substitute for
reality. It is a web of fanciful lies that obscures ugly truths. It
is what totalitarian regimes tell their citizens. The credibility
deficit of propaganda media in such societies renders them extremely
vulnerable. As Przeworski (1991) notes, when you have a system built
on lies, all you need is someone to say that the emperor has no
clothes for everything to collapse. Some of what the Singapore press
does can be described as propaganda, but it is a qualitatively
different kind of propaganda. It is not so much the propagation of
lies, but of spin: the framing of debates and the setting of agendas
in a way that suits the government. The Singapore government does use
the media to rally support for its policies, to make the opposition's
job harder, and indeed to mould a modern Singaporean that will think
and behave a certain way. But it does not use the media to invent an
image that will substitute for reality an image that can be pricked
by an inconvenient fact, an exposι or investigative report. The
government instead believes in getting governance right and
harnessing the press to facilitate that process, rather than using
the press to conceal bad governance. One example is the running
controversy over the high salaries that ministers and senior civil
servants receive. Journalists in Singapore would find it difficult to
criticise that policy, but the government has not tried to hide the
fact of its high salaries. More importantly, it does not use its
media controls to conceal corruption. On the contrary, the state's
internal anti-corruption watchdogs are fearless and fearsome, such
that Singapore is one of the most corruption-free countries in the
world, despite the fact that the press is relatively toothless as a
watchdog against corruption.
Conclusion
The above inter-related factors may explain why the Singapore press
has not failed the market test despite its obvious credibility
deficit. The argument adds up to a rather uncomfortable implication
for media reformers that a lack of believability may not be a
sufficiently devastating turn-off for the public. Nor is it
necessarily an Achilles' heel that alternative media can exploit
easily. People seem willing to tolerate and support through their
purchasing decisions media that are politically controlled. Whether
it is influential is another matter altogether. In an environment of
growing plurality of information, the dominant media are likely to
have less of a cognitive and ideological hold on its readers,
especially in those areas of coverage that are perceived to be unfair
or incomplete. While continuing to use these media for other
gratifications, readers may be strategically supplementing their
media diets with information and viewpoints from alternative media,
such as independent websites, and from face-to-face discussion. Thus,
while the credibility deficit does not appear to have exacted a cost
in terms of market share or circulation, it may have eroded the
influence and prestige of the national media in ways that may have
long-term political consequences. On the other hand, while political
control compromises the believability of news media, it is as yet
unclear how it affects community affiliation Meyer's second key
dimension of credibility. In authoritarian systems with of strong
political parallelism, it is conceivable that the national (and
nationalistic) press is valued by the public because of rather than
despite its pro-establishment character.
Although merely a preliminary exploration of a single case, the above
analysis is suggestive for research into other contexts, and compels
us to probe assumptions about the marketplace of ideas. As China, for
example, undergoes economic liberalisation in its media industries,
it is as yet unclear whether the public will demand and reward news
organisations that strive for greater political independence and
believability. The broader issue is whether the media are in this
respect a case of market failure. The media have a vital political
role in supporting democracy through journalism that is independent
of power. However, this is not the only and perhaps not even the
most important role that readers and viewers value. They may be
prepared to overlook major shortcomings in political coverage if the
media serve their other functions with sufficient professionalism, or
demonstrate their affiliation to the national community. Singapore's
news media continue to pursue publishing excellence in various
directions, notably in design and presentation, and in investing
heavily in its regional coverage. Such media may then continue to
prosper, at the expense of those that try to provide more independent
and credible political coverage. Thus, as Singaporeans have
discovered, the marketplace can be charitable to politically-controlled media.
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