Crossing the Line
It did not take long for the foreign press to learn what the new legislation would mean in practice. Within a month, Time found itself under pressure. [25] Three days after the legislation went into effect, Time published an article titled “Silencing the Dissenters.” The piece was critical of Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and painted a sympathetic portrait of an opposition politician, J. B. Jeyaretnam. Jeyaretnam, incidentally, was one of the only two parliamentarians to vote against the new newspaper law.
Footnotes
[25] Time ’s run-in with the authorities was the first case of the enforcement of the amended Newspaper Act. An earlier incident that year, however, highlighted the government’s increasingly testy relationship with the foreign press. In March 1986, a Reuter’s correspondent was expelled from the country after she reported that rescue workers were charging victims of a hotel collapse for their services. The government responded, saying that the reporter had not checked her facts and that she relied exclusively on one source, a victim “who was suffering from shock and delirium at the time.” Tommy T.B. Koh, Singapore ambassador to Washington, Letter to the Editor, The New York Times , November 1, 1986.