There’s nothing wrong with being scared: As a journalist from Singapore grows up,her views on those who have self-censored change

Reporter Kirsten Han used to think older journalists were weak for not covering a controversial story, but now she’s starting to understand why

SINGAPORE’S GOVERNMENT IS debating the introduction of yet more legislation.

This time, it says it’s going after “foreign interference” – which will be defined however the ruling People’s Action Party would like it to be.

Last September, my organisation and I were namechecked in a speech by K Shanmugam, minister for home affairs and law, about the potential legislation, so I have every expectation of being adversely affected by its inevitable passage.

For months, I’ve wondered ahead of every sitting of parliament if this is going to be the one at which an anti-foreign interference bill will be tabled. I’m still waiting.

Since the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act – a law giving the government extremely broad powers, ostensibly to combat “fake news” – came into effect in October last year, I’ve found myself hesitating over my work in ways more pronounced than ever before.

I dawdle over things that I would have simply proceeded with previously. I second-guess interviews I’ve done. I run through every paranoid scenario in my mind, highly conscious that I’m operating in an environment where the government would seize any opportunity to discredit prominent critical voices or shut down dissent. I feel like the margin of error that I’m allowed is zero. I wonder how feasible that is in a context where there is no freedom of information and no whistleblower protection, and where investigative journalism barely exists.

I have started dragging my heels on some stories. I tell myself that I’m busy with other things but, in reality, I know I’m afraid. Not of penalties such as fines or jail time – although they’d certainly be unpleasant – but of the mental and emotional burden.

I know what I can expect because I’ve been through some of it before: the online trolling from the pro-ruling party camp, the smug viral posts spreading misinformation about me on social media, the misogynist comments on forum pages, the newspaper articles that trigger anxiety among my closest family members, the sense of being marked, the uncertainty of whether things might escalate further, and what else I might have to face.

It’s draining to think of these potential consequences. It feels as if it would be easier simply not to approach that line, not to attract that sort of trouble. So stories get postponed indefinitely, and self-censorship digs in a little deeper.

This is a position I’d naively imagined I would always be able to avoid. As a young journalist, I had viewed the mainstream media journalists who’d reported on the use of detention without trial in 1987 with contempt. In that year, the government rounded up 22 volunteers, social workers and theatre practitioners, accused them of a “Marxist conspiracy” to overthrow Singapore’s elected government, and threw them behind bars. No evidence was ever presented before a judge, and no one was convicted in a court of law.

CREDIT: Bridgeman Images/Diane Ong

The main newspaper published ministry statements verbatim, while televised confessions – which the former detainees say were made under duress – were recorded and broadcast. When I first learnt about this period of history, I saw the journalists and editors of these media outlets as complicit in the oppression and the state-led smear campaign, surrendering their professional integrity to play ball.

Years later, when working as a stringer for a wire agency filing breaking news from Singapore, I found myself typing up ministry statements about how they’d detained individuals under the very same law used in 1987. This time, the government claimed that the individuals had been detained because they’d been radicalised into supporting Isis, and needed to be taken into custody as part of Singapore’s counter-terrorism efforts.

Apart from that government statement there was no other source. There was no way to get access to the accused individuals to interview them and I was highly unlikely to find anyone who knew those people to give on-the-record comments. The police weren’t going to say anything that different from the Ministry of Home Affairs, and there was no chance that showing up at the detention centre would yield any result. Yet journalists for other outlets were certainly filing stories, and if their pieces came out without a peep from me, my editors would be demanding answers.

I filed the story.

Democracies operate via leaders elected by the will of the people, but authoritarian political systems also require the co-operation of their citizens. Often all that’s needed is a decision to look the other way or not push back.

It might not stem from malicious intent or some craven desire to suck up to power. But non-resistance is complicity all the same.

When we allow ourselves to give in to oppression and to self-censor, we become complicit in the system, taking on the burden of policing ourselves in ways that ultimately suit authoritarian and oppressive institutions. We might not be doing this willingly, but the ultimate effect of a disempowered, “obedient” population is achieved anyway.

Fighting self-censorship and self-policing isn’t easy. It gets especially tricky when such patterns of behaviour become entrenched and normalised.

There’s nothing wrong with being scared or hesitant, especially when the situation gives us reason to be. It’s also unrealistic to expect moral purity and imagine that any of us can live without being complicit in any problematic or oppressive structures.

We might not be expected to lead revolutions, but more often than not it is the act of staying still that’s the true complicity. And we can’t be constantly letting ourselves off the hook.