News media in Malaysia and Singapore are often said to be constrained in covering political and public issues, in comparison with plural democratic states such as Australia. However, commentary also suggests that online communications are allowing more independent speech.Kenyon's article investigates whether such restrictions and changes online can be identified, using an analysis of media content to illustrate factors relevant to the concept of a "chilling effect" on public speech, including matters of law, media ownership, journalistic practices, and civil society. He suggests that although news is constrained in Malaysia and Singapore, it seems that online media can be less limited. Rather than the internet being decisive, however, it is the extent of civil society and political opposition that appear more significant.
Kenyon comments that -
Overall, the differences in content between Singapore, Malaysia, and Australia are consistent with several strands of the existing literature. First, they support the importance of less restrictive ownership laws in allowing the potential for greater speech online. Second, they show the emergence of examples of independent journalism online; examples which, drawing as they do from domestically trained journalists, suggest that normative arguments for ASEAN media serving primarily a national-building and government-supporting role deserve critical examination and substantial modification, if not rejection. Third, and perhaps most importantly, they suggest the importance of civil society and political opposition in underpinning public speech.He indicates that for legal analysts -
it is worth noting the results are certainly consistent with defamation law affecting public speech. There are differences in the overall rates of defamatory content found in Australia compared with the rates in Malaysia and Singapore, particularly in relation to what is traditionally thought of as political and public interest material. Indications that speech is constrained, and that law may be a factor, in turn support further investigation of how the legal rules — or their application — may differ from contemporary commonwealth standards. ... the success rate of defamation plaintiffs from Singapore's governing Peoples' Action Party is "overwhelming", with no leader having "ever lost a defamation action against an opposition leader in the Singapore courts". While plaintiffs are thought commonly to succeed in defamation actions under the traditional English law, the Singapore experience is still quite unlike that in other common law jurisdictions. At the same time, the reasoning offered by judges in Singapore defamation cases has long been criticized as disappointing and insufficient ... The results here reinforce such concerns and underlie the value in closer examination of the application of defamation doctrine in Malaysia and Singapore — particularly in comparison with the approach in English law and other commonwealth jurisdictions — to see what part the law and its operation plays in the limited speech that is evident in the media content of Malaysia and Singapore. However, a useful caution for lawyers also follows from this study of media content. At least in contexts like Malaysia and Singapore, where multiple factors tend to constrain media speech compared to more plural democracies, law may well not be the most significant element.He concludes that -
the implications are wider than the three jurisdictions examined here. This study suggests the value in considering a range of factors in relation to any chilling effect on public speech. Law, media ownership and control, practices of journalism, and the style and extent of civil society, and political opposition all interact within an ecology of public speech. To consider only one of these elements may be unnecessarily limiting. For example, suppositions about legal effects on the media, which are commonplace within the media law literature, can be investigated through a variety of theoretical and empirical means. But if legal scholarship is to understand the role of law within mediated speech, it could usefully remember the wider context in which law exists. For it is in that context that one might understand a little more about how the law might matter. Thus, research into public speech could take account of a range of relevant factors, such as media ownership, journalistic traditions, and civil society, as well as law. Equally, the study illustrates how media content research can, perhaps especially for questions related to free speech, benefit from the judicious use of legal concepts and techniques. Here, a legally informed analysis has revealed the importance of some existing strands of non-legal scholarship about the region, especially those related to the roles of technology, journalism, and politics in public speech.
