Written by Eric Ellis | |
Friday, 11 January 2008 | |
The media king’s purchase of Dow Jones & Co. has delivered some unwanted cargo in the form of a long-running libel suit. In July of 2006, the Far Eastern Economic Review, reduced to a monthly shadow of its weekly former self, published a long and contentious interview with Chee Soon Juan, the harried leader of the opposition Singapore Democratic Party. The magazine promptly found itself the recipient of a letter from Drew & Napier, the lawyers for the autocratic minister mentor Lee Kuan Yew, and his son, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, demanding an apology. The only suspense is over how big the judgment will be against the magazine. The Lee family has never lost a libel suit in its own courts. And there’s the problem for media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who paid US$6.8 billion for a controlling interest in Dow Jones & Co. which, in addition to publishing the Review, also owns the Wall Street Journal and its international editions. The city-state has rather been regarded by Murdoch’s News Corp as a place to raise money and do business – notably in 2001 when Murdoch briefly entered into a joint venture with Singapore's state-owned telecom company SingTel (then run by a son of Lee Kuan Yew) in an unsuccessful bid for Hong Kong's leading telecom company, when they were outmaneuvered by Beijing and Li Ka-shing’s son, Richard. The presumption of a loss is such that media companies routinely settle promptly and apologize. The most recent, last November, was the Financial Times, which settled for unspecified damages and apologized in a case that according to non-Singaporean legal scholars contained no libel. As with the FT, management usually decides that a quick settlement limits expensive legal bills –and possibly even higher damages if Lee lawyers insist mid-trial that publicly heard evidence has further harmed sensitive reputations, which prevents airing of issues that may be germane to the case. In an earlier case involving the Review, the Anglo-Australian constitutional lawyer Geoffrey Robertson’s cross-examination of the elder Lee was so rigorous that a Singaporean judged awarded additional damages for his discomfort in the witness box. Both have helped build institutions of about the same size; News Corp's market worth approaches US$100 billion, Singapore's GDP is bigger. Both are expert at projecting power, and neither brook any challenge to their authority, although media critics accuse Murdoch of knuckling under to Chinese authorities, for instance dropping the British Broadcasting System from Star TV’s stable of cable news programs broadcast in China, in an effort to curry favor. In addition, Andrew Neil, the feisty one-time editor of Murdoch’s Sunday Times in London, lost his job after Malaysia’s then-Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed took issue with the paper in 1994, just after Murdoch bought Star TV. . But then came Murdoch's successful bid for Dow Jones last year. Murdoch put in a new team, and much of the management that previously backed the Review's feistier approach to Singapore is no longer around. The US embassy in Singapore has frequently expressed concern about "the ruling party's use of the court system to intimidate political opponents.” The Australian lawyer Stuart Littlemore, who has observed Singapore libel cases for the International Commission of Jurists, says "the Singapore leadership has a long-standing record of using the High Court as a mechanism for silencing its opponents – by suing them for statements that, in any comparable jurisdiction, would be seen as part of a robust political debate inseparable from democratic freedoms, and by being awarded such unconscionably high damages and costs as to bankrupt the defendants, forcing them out of parliament.” There were numerous critics, notably in its own newsrooms, and including some members of the publisher's controlling Bancroft family (which quickly put aside its gripes in accepting the generous offer). The critics said Murdoch and his company had insufficient credibility to be custodians of venerable media assets like The Wall Street Journal and The Far Eastern Economic Review. But just as Murdoch has been cited as providing the type of media Asia does not want, notably by China, wealthy Singapore is often cited as a regional development model, particularly in effective one-party states like China and through Central Asia. Singapore is an important, if sometimes self-serving, voice in the so-called Asian Values debate. It will be fascinating to see how the battle plays out, mindful of the messages it could send around a region where state control of media is evolving. Democracy and civil society are aching to burst out, but debilitating libel cases clearly are not yet dead, At least not in the Lees’ Singapore. http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=979&Itemid=32 |