Television News in Singapore: Mediating Conflict and Consent

Abstract

Singapore's television media, notwithstanding the island's economic successes, is widely considered to be tightly controlled and regulated by the government. The role of Singapore's television news in enabling or curtailing democratic processes, however, remains largely unnoticed and under-theorised. This article reports on recent research which secures added empirical purchase on Singapore's TV journalism today and does so by identifying, mapping and pursuing into the production domain the repertoire of communicative frames that differentially characterise contemporary TV news in Singapore. Our findings document that there is considerably more complexity in the ecology and communicative frames of TV news than has so far been acknowledged or explored and these complexities have direct bearing on debates about the mediation of conflict and consent in Singapore's brand of 'democracy'.