Mas Selamat Kastari, escapee from incarceration in Singapore

This is perhaps the only meaningful thing that I’ve read about the escape of JI leader Mas Selamat Kastari:

[F]ollowing the mainstream media over the first 24 hours was frustrating and farcical. Not because the public must get answers instantly – I don’t believe that government or anyone else must serve the 24-hour news cycle at the expense of more urgent tasks – but because people deserve to know that questions of public interest are taken seriously by the journalists who serve them [...]

[Professional journalists have] a standard way of handling unavoidable gaps in your story, such as when newsmakers are not ready to answer questions by press time: you simply raise the question in your story, and state that answers are not yet forthcoming.

[The foreign media did so, yet in] Singapore, in the first 24 hours following the escape, it was left to the bizarre combination of independent bloggers and PAP MPs to ask the question that was on everyone’s mind. Singapore’s mainstream media acted as if they didn’t want to know.

When the national news media are so uniformly guilty of a lapse that puts them so clearly out of sync with other opinion shapers – in this case, the foreign media, local bloggers and even PAP backbenchers – there can be only one logical explanation: media management by the government. Editors must have been instructed not to raise the “how” question publicly.

Much as I agree with what’s quoted above, I’m not as charitable as Cherian in letting the government off the look. His article dissects the government’s credibility issues as separate from those of the media, despite the fact that the government is responsible for many of these newsworthy stories that eventually end up in the domestic and international media. Perhaps he’s arguing from generic grounds, but the other examples of fiascoes that he brings out - Nicoll Highway, NKF and SAF fatalities - ultimately stem from abrogations of government responsibility.

Nevertheless, the government must be held accountable, and it is being held accountable in some eyes - even if those eyes belong only to the motley crew of “opinion shapers” - bloggers, PAP ministers and the foreign media.

I still dream that the day will come that ministers in Singapore will take responsibility for scandals and mistakes of this magnitude and bow out of their positions. Is it so difficult to hold ministers and public servants to the same standards as anyone else earning a salary on the private market, especially considering that that’s their justification for their ostentatious wages?

As sad as it seems, the government doesn’t seem to learn from its mistakes, and the public continues its short-memory, near-Markovian indulgence of righteous outrage. Remember the last time a full-scale manhunt was launched in Singapore? Remember Pulau Tekong and the three Indonesian fugitives back in March 2004? Remember that in the end, it was Gurkha officers who caught them, not the other local authorities. Remember George Santayana’s famous quote:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

References

  1. Cherian George, The other casualty of the Great Escape: mainstream media credibility, 2008-03-02.
  2. Getforme Singapore, Three fugitives on Pulau Tekong captured, 2004-03-21.