COMMENT: Rights and responsibilities in Benjamin Lim case

Home Affairs and Law Minister K Shanmugam spoke about the Benjamin Lim case in Parliament on Tuesday, 1 March 2016. (Reuters file photo).

The most reasonable, thoughtful and purposeful remark to come out of Parliament during Home Minister K Shanmugam’s statement on Benjamin Lim’s death belonged to a People’s Action Party (PAP) Member of Parliament.

Jessica Tan asked politely but firmly: “In situations where it’s very emotive and very sensitive, while I totally understand your stance of handling the information very carefully…is there a way to share at least some information with online news sites?”

That goes to the heart of an issue that has put the spotlight on how children should be investigated, The Online Citizen’s (TOC’s) journalism practices and the government’s attitude towards news portals.

Shanmugam responded like a lawyer would. There were issues of sub judice, contempt of court and the privacy of Benjamin’s family, he said.

The MP should have stood up to ask a follow-up question: “I see your point. But what made the Minister change his mind?”

Alas, our Parliament hardly sees follow-up questions, and an opportunity was lost to probe the Minister’s thinking on the 35-day wait to bring the circumstances leading to Benjamin’s death to the public’s attention.

So why did the Police not reply to TOC? The answer lies in the kind of socio-political site that TOC is and how the government views it as a news platform.

The government does not see TOC as a “friendly” website like, for example, The Straits Times. It is one of a couple of websites that has not had an interview with a Minister, yet another indication of where TOC stands in the government’s popularity scales.

In 2011, it was gazetted as a political organisation, meaning it cannot receive foreign money and has to declare all donations. In 2015 alone, the government asked it to take down three articles, one of which was an interview with a man whose company sued the Defence Ministry for allegedly usurping its patent for a mobile emergency medical station.

There were other factors at play. TOC is not what it was many years ago. It lost a number of its editors, which effectively removed the extra eyes that a newsroom needs to help the editor make important and responsible decisions.

Today, it is a one-man show with Chief Editor Terry Xu running the operations single-handedly. That is an impossible task, especially for a site that has made robust reporting its mission in life and in a country where the government has hardly changed its media policy, some aspects of which belong to an era which many concerned citizens would frown upon.

Then there was the sudden entry of a number of news websites, which seemed to have deeper pockets, with an immediate eye on covering the 2015 general elections in a way that both the mainstream media and TOC won’t do.

This muddied the waters somewhat with TOC seen to be losing the readership traction that it once enjoyed.

Chief Editor Xu was thrown into this helpless situation. No people, no money and a drop in people getting excited by its stories.

He had two options: reinvent its reportage or continue to bang on with its editorial approach.

The Benjamin Lim case shows that Xu chose the latter and is now under intense scrutiny for its reportage.

Those who have gone through the hothouse of journalism will tell you that TOC’s reliance on one source for a story is a slippery slope to trouble.

The least that the government could have done was to reply to TOC by saying that it was premature to give a statement because of legal issues and a concern for the welfare of the Benjamin family. Or gone one step further to clarify points that it had established.

That way the authorities would have been on a much higher moral ground when it trained its guns on TOC.

Should TOC have held the story or done more work on it?

I asked an online news editor what the journalist would have done if she was in a similar situation. After some toing and froing, she said she would have held the story.

Xu should have done that and done more work to establish some of the facts of the case. And the government should have tried to engage TOC with some kind of response, which is what it would have done with the mainstream media and some other news platforms.

News outlets have the right to publish stories but also have a responsibility to make sure that its information is accurate.

The government has the right to remain silent but has the responsibility to respond to news organisations.

All said and done, one sad fact remains. A young life was cruelly crushed and the 14-year-old’s family will continue to live in sorrow and pain for a long, long time. Let us not forget this as we continue to discuss the Benjamin Lim saga.

P N Balji is a veteran Singaporean journalist who is the former chief editor of TODAY newspaper, and a media consultant. The views expressed are his own.

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