Two Ministers, a blogger, and an infuriated Singaporean

Ok, I totally did not agree with Mr Brown's article. I didn't even find it funny. But this response to the article--

"It is not the role of journalists or newspapers in Singapore to champion issues, or campaign for or against the Government. If a columnist presents himself as a non-political observer, while exploiting his access to the mass media to undermine the Government's standing with the electorate, then he is no longer a constructive critic, but a partisan player in politics." - K. Bhavani, Press Secretary, Ministry of Information, Communication, and the Arts.

--is the clearest expression of the anti-free press position of the current Singapore government I have ever seen. It's really quite, quite amazing. 2 claims are being made here: 1) It is not the role of journalists to criticise the government. 2) If you criticise the government and thereby undermine the government's standing with the people, you are partisan. And here I was naively thinking that partisanship meant placing party loyalty over loyalty to the people. But in Singapore, when you are so loyal to the people that you are willing to stick your neck out to criticise the government, you are partisan. I cannot believe it. More Bhavani:

"They are polemics dressed up as analysis, blaming the Government for all that he is unhappy with. He offers no alternatives or solutions." - ibid

I'm sorry, I was under the impression that it was the job of civil servants to come up with solutions to citizens' criticisms, not to tell citizens to stop criticising if they have no solutions. A Minister defends the government's position:

"The Government was merely exercising its right of reply" - Lee Boon Yang, Minister for Information, Communication and the Arts.

Let's assume very optimistically for a second that the suspension of Mr Brown's column immediately after the fateful article was a decision made by an overzealous editor, not the result of a directive coming down from up high. Let's assume that the government had really, really not intended to shut him up, but to engage him in debate, to draw him into "constructive" criticism. Well, they've not done very well, have they? They've failed to engage Mr Brown's arguments entirely. I could have come up with a better response. Instead, by throwing up their hands and saying, "Well, you haven't got any solutions either, have you?", they've implicitly accepted his criticisms. If they're so interested in holding Mr Brown "accountable for [his] opinions" (-Vivian Balakrishnan, Second Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts), why did they not even try? Telling someone he shouldn't even have said what he said in the first place is not a way of rebutting his arguments. But that's what our government has chosen to do. And what if, what if one of our elected leaders (or worse still, a civil servant--I shudder at the thought) actually rang the editor and said, suspend his column? Everytime something like this happens, my faith in this government is eroded some, but when everything blows over, they make conciliatory noises (witness the lifting of the podcast ban after the elections), I think, maybe this government does want change, maybe I should give it time. But I've written this post mainly for my benefit, so I do not forget the times that I have been disappointed.