Karle and Dow Jones now faced a difficult choice: apologize and pay the fine, or fight the Singapore government in the courts. The intervention—clearly not coincidental—of the Ministry of Information in what had been, until this point, a private matter between FEER and the Lees was ominous, and raised the stakes. What should FEER make of this move, and should it influence Karle’s response?

Keep the peace? On the one hand, there were good arguments for simply acceding to the Lees’ demands. Given the track record of foreign press organizations which chose to fight the Singapore government, legal action was arguably futile. The government had not lost a single libel case against the media. The time, effort, and money it would take to fight a case Dow Jones would surely lose could amount to nothing more than a waste of resources. Such reasoning had figured in some of the earlier press settlements, notes Professor Chan, and it was understandable: “You don’t have the energy to fight, you don’t have the means to fight. [Or] your boss doesn’t want you to fight, right? I mean, what a hassle.”

Listen to Chan on contesting a media case in Singapore.
Length: 38 sec

This seemed a reasonable calculus in this instance for several reasons. First, the Lees apparently wanted to make an example of FEER. A successful suit would remind the foreign media that they were still merely tolerated guests in Singapore. Second, the fact that the Ministry of Information had revoked the exemptions of several publications, and reinterpreted its own law to include the monthly FEER among offshore publications, indicated that the government was prepared to go to considerable lengths to reassert its primacy. As former FEER editor Plott puts it:

The problem is that nobody has ever won against [the government] in Singaporean courts, and having operated in that environment myself, it does have an effect on you. You make a calculation: Is it worth it to trigger this legal action?

But there was more to consider than FEER itself. The magazine, which relied on revenues from subscriptions rather than ads and had few readers in Singapore, had relatively little to lose should the government cap its circulation or even ban it outright. But the Review was part of a larger publishing group. Its parent company Dow Jones had significant interests in Singapore. It was not inconceivable that the government would retaliate against FEER by going after Dow Jones domestically, with the potential to do much harm. As Plott points out, “in Singapore, as long as you were operating reasonably globally and you are not writing offensive things about Singapore, the perception is that they wouldn’t attack [other] assets.” But FEER had written about Singapore, and the leadership deemed it offensive.

Singapore and Hong Kong together comprised the bulk of Dow Jones’s Asian readership. The Wall Street Journal Asia had a bureau in Singapore and Dow Jones Newswires Asian operations were based in Singapore. Losing that base would be a high price to pay for an article in a journal with a circulation of only 15,000. Keeping a low profile could be the best course of action. Bloomberg’s achievement—settling its 2002 dispute in less than three weeks—could not have been far from Karle’s mind.

Or fight back? On the other hand, Dow Jones enjoyed a well-deserved reputation for defending its various publications and, by extension, freedom of the press. A central tenet of press freedom was an editorial writer’s right to express an opinion. Another was refusal to self-censor. Many observers, including members of the press, felt that Western journalists in recent years had responded to Singapore’s heavy-handed legal tactics by censoring their own stories. Former FEER editor Plott, for one, had heard colleagues resort to the argument that it was not worth covering Singaporean domestic politics because Singapore’s citizens themselves were not demanding such coverage. “In my personal view, that’s a rationalization,” observes Plott.

You are not writing about it, because you know it’s delicate territory. So there’s this whole calculus that you work through when you are facing stories in certain countries where you know the legal environment is hostile.

Perhaps the time had come to reassert the media’s right to write about Singapore’s political process in the same way it would cover other democracies. As Professor Chan puts it:

What the international media do has implications. [Earlier settlements] emboldened Lee Kuan Yew, it emboldened the Singaporean model. It also has implications because China looks up to Lee Kuan Yew, looks up to the Singaporean model, an authoritarian model with a developed economy.

Over the years, Dow Jones had turned to the courts in a number of cases when governments tried to censor or restrain its correspondents. In August 2006, it was on track to win a particularly difficult legal case in London. Mohammed Jameel, a Saudi businessman named in a February 2002 Wall Street Journal Europe article as having a financial connection to Al-Qaeda, sued the European Journal in the UK for libel.

Dow Jones had pursued the case as far as the House of Lords, and a ruling was pending. Signs were favorable for a landmark decision. Were the court to rule in Dow Jones’ favor, it might well strengthen dramatically existing Commonwealth guidelines for responsible reporting. The Common Law decisions of the House of Lords should be controlling in Singapore, as a member of the Commonwealth. “No other media in the UK had fought this up to the House of Lords. They kind of gave up,” says Weisenhaus of Hong Kong University. “It took an outside company like Dow Jones.”

Karle must have considered the London case as he deliberated what to do in Singapore. If a US company could fight for its interests and for the ideal of press freedom in one British Common Law country, why not in another? If Dow Jones believed in freedom of the press, then it should be willing to fight for it wherever and whenever the need arose. The prospect of financial damage or a nasty court battle should not be the determining factors. Finally, he had to consider the effect of Dow Jones’ strategy on future staff recruitment. Would top journalists want to work for Dow Jones publications if they doubted the company’s willingness to defend them should they find themselves in legal jeopardy? Karle knew he had to respond soon—and with conviction.