Obliterating The Political: One-party ideological dominance and the personalization of news in Singapore 21

Abstract

Political issues are typically covered by quality dailies as hard news; in the case of the Straits Times—a highly regarded English-language newspaper in Asia and the national daily in Singapore—hard political news acquires a human-interest feel despite journalists’ efforts to follow hard news conventions and to inject controversy into their coverage. While in liberal societies, this phenomenon has been attributed to commercialization, I argue that in Singapore, this human-interest element could be traced to the ideological dominance of the one-party government. In the absence of alternative frames, the official framing of national issues as questions of personal morality becomes the dominant ideological frame for journalists. There are two significant consequences of the shift from a political to a moral frame: the distinction between hard and soft news is blurred and media discourse becomes de-politicized.

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