Mediacorp’s CNA remains the most popular traditional news brand, used weekly by 39%, followed by SPH’s The Straits Times (38%) and Mediacorp’s Channel 5 (27%) and Channel 8 (25%) newscasts. 4 The government justified its move by saying swift actions were needed against COVID-19-related falsehoods that can trigger public panic. While Facebook complied with the government order, it expressed concern ‘about the precedent this sets for stifling freedom of expression in Singapore’. While the website had been banned in Singapore since 2018, followers could still access its Facebook page until the government ordered local access to be blocked in February 2021.
Operated outside the country, the STR is a website critical of the administration that has been called out for publishing sensationalised and inaccurate accounts, and it is also used weekly by 7% of our survey respondents. Some of the orders targeted posts by opposition parties during the campaign, 2 while others targeted COVID-19 related claims, such as one posted by the States Times Review (STR) on Facebook claiming that COVID-19 spread in schools in May 2020. Last year, the Singapore government issued several correction orders under its Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA), a law passed in May 2019 that empowers ministers to issue corrections or take down orders against online falsehoods. A combination of the elections and the pandemic may help explain the increase in news media trust – which is up by nine percentage points – as residents found themselves relying on the news media for important and accurate information, amid the flurry of fake news online. Singapore held its general elections in July 2020, where the ruling party won the majority of the seats, as expected, but its share of total votes shrank as the political opposition gained ground.
Initially praised internationally for its handling of the COVID-19 virus, Singapore went through pockets of panic buying as the number of positive cases exponentially rose in dorms occupied by migrant workers in March 2020 – leading to nearly two months of lockdown. Mediacorp operates all the local television stations and most radio stations in Singapore. SPH publishes most of Singapore’s local newspapers, including Chinese-language Lianhe Zaobao, Malay-language Berita Harian, and Tamil-language Tamil Murasu.
Mainstream news media brands remain the most trusted news sources, with MediaCorp’s round-the-clock news network Channel News Asia (CNA) being the most trusted (79%) followed by the newspaper The Straits Times (77%) published by the Singapore Press Holdings (SPH). The pandemic and the elections also saw the government invoke the country’s ‘fake news law’ several times, sparking criticisms. Trust in the news media in Singapore has increased significantly in a year marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, a historical election that saw the political opposition make unprecedented gains, as well as layoffs in one of the two media conglomerates in the country.
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