Singapore - offending the sensibilities of government

As for the Murdoch-owned Far East Economic Review, it denied any wrongdoing but said it would pay up to avoid a protracted legal battle.

Journalists in Singapore generally agree that the government’s targeting of libel suits against global news organisations such as The Economist, the International Herald Tribune, the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg has had the required chilling effect.

Astonishingly, international news organisations have been largely silenced by the threat of having to pay substantial damages or having their access to the lucrative Singapore market curtailed.

Stories that quote an opposition politician or civil society expert are rare, while hard-hitting investigative journalism is virtually non-existent.

Says Bland, “The real victims of this repression are not foreign correspondents like me, who can re-locate, or large news organisations such as Dow Jones, which can afford to bear the costs of an occasional libel suit, but Singaporeans.”

The government’s regular attacks on the foreign press and its exercise of direct control over the domestic media means a corrosive atmosphere of self-censorship is all-pervasive.

The ruling People’s Action Party refuses to clarify what it is that journalists can and cannot report. By doing so it ensures that most journalists and other commentators err on the side of caution - especially Singaporeans, who have much more to lose than their foreign counterparts if they fall foul of the authorities.

The Committee to Protect Journalists, a press freedom campaign group, says Bland is "the latest on a long list of foreign journalists who have been targeted by the government for their news coverage".

Intriguingly, one of the recent pieces Bland wrote was on a forum run by opponents of the death penalty in Singapore. There, activists, including human rights lawyer M. Ravi, suggested that the government was perhaps becoming more open to providing information on how many people it hangs and for what crimes.

Amnesty International has described such killings as a hidden tool of the government, but while denouncing this report as wrong, the government refuses to release up-to-date figures on the deaths.

Singapore believes that censorship is needed to keep its people in line, harking back to riots in 1950, 1964 and 1969.

The 1950 riots are blamed partly on uninhibited reporting and are often cited as examples of how the press can incite racial and ethnic violence. The Malay press is accused of playing up an angle that Maria Hertogh, a Dutch girl raised as a Muslim by a Malay family was being forced to take up the Christian religion. The story was read by the Muslim community as a case of religious injustice and the resulting riot left 18 people dead and 173 hurt.