Opinion | Tan Tarn How’s The Press Gang speaks an unprintable truth about Singapore’s news media
The centrepiece of the Singapore Theatre Festival forces audiences to confront this question: can anyone complain about a government’s lack of transparency when no one is willing to stick their necks out for it?
The centrepiece of this year’s recently concluded Singapore Theatre Festival is a play about the newsroom. It’s entitled The Press Gang, written by an old hand of both theatre and journalism, Tan Tarn How.
Mr Tan is a rigorous intellectual and a fiery dramatist, and Press Gang is his eighth full-length play in a long career that includes a successful Hong Kong production, The First Emperor’s Last Days, staged by the Chung Ying Theatre Company in 1998.
Much has been said in other reviews about how accurately Mr Tan, a former journalist with The Straits Times (ST), chronicles the state’s sophisticated control of Singapore’s mainstream media.
What’s the ‘dirty secret’ of Western academics who self-censor work
But I cannot begin mine without a disclosure: I, too, was a reporter with ST from 2005 to 2007. My stint did not overlap with Mr Tan’s, whose 16 years at the paper included roles as diverse as political reporter, China correspondent and deputy news editor.
Mr Tan draws from this ample experience to create a fictional newspaper called The Singapore Times, whose journalists’ central dilemma is how to report an incident of abuse at the highest echelons of government.
Specifically, how do you report corruption within a sovereign wealth fund when the senior executive at the heart of that corruption is a close relative of the fictive prime minister?
In Hong Kong, the answer would be fairly straightforward: you report it. But not in Singapore, at least according to Press Gang.
