Newspaper and Printing Presses Act

The Newspaper and Printing Presses Act (NPPA) came about in 1974, with some revisions over the years. Broadly speaking, it is significant on four counts.

Licensing

The NPPA requires anyone who wants to “keep and use a press for the printing of documents” to get a licence, and this licence can be withdrawn, indefinitely or otherwise. This was a continuation of the discretionary licensing that the British colonial government had practiced.

Management Shares

The NPPA states that newspaper companies, which must be public companies, shall have two classes of shares, management shares and ordinary shares. Management shares can only be issued or transferred to those who have the approval of the government. Holders of management shares have 200 times more voting rights than ordinary shareholders with regards to “the appointment or dismissal of a director or any member of the staff of a newspaper company”. This in effect gives government nominees control over the so-called top management of a newspaper company.

Ordinary shareholders were, from 1977, limited to a 3% stake. This was to prevent the rise of, to borrow Lee Kuan Yew’s words, any “wealthy press baron”1 who might inject his political beliefs or agenda into a newspaper.

It is the aspect of management shares that is surely the brilliance of the NPPA. As opposed to, say, outright government ownership or blatant censorship, this is certainly a more subtle, yet no less powerful, means of control. It is argued that this method of control is wise precisely because of its subtlety (see calibrated coercion). Indeed, what the NPPA does is to help the government maintain control by defusing control (giving it an economic aspect) and keeping it behind the scenes. For example, Lee Kuan Yew had this to say about the giving of management shares to banks and other establishment figures: “They would remain politically neutral and protect stability and growth because of their business interests.”2 This can be said to be a calibration of the newspaper company’s pragmatic interests (e.g. profits) such that it is in line with the interests of the government.

No foreign ownership

There was to be no more foreign ownership of the press. This is not surprising given the historical antagonism between the foreign-owned / controlled press and the PAP. The latter’s main bone of contention is that such newspapers are not obliged to be socially responsible in their reporting, and do not give heed to the distinct needs of a developing nation such as Singapore.

Lee Kuan Yew said in a letter to the Straits Times in 1959: “The folly of allowing newspapers to be owned by people who are not citizens or nationals of the country, is that their sense of responsibility is blunted by the knowledge that if the worst came to the worst, they could always buzz off to some other place. Hence the clear-cut distinction in our attitude to locally owned or controlled press and foreign-owned or controlled press.”3

The events of 1971 were arguably an impetus to action – in that year the "Nanyang Siang Pau", "Herald" (believed to have been financed from foreign sources) and "Eastern Sun" (which had received nearly HK$8 million from an alleged communist source in HK) were said to be involved in “black operations”.

Regulates foreign publications

The NPPA regulates the sale, reproduction and distribution of foreign newspapers. Article 24 (1) states that the Minister may declare any newspaper published outside Singapore to be “engaging in the domestic politics of Singapore”. Circulation of foreign publications can be restricted – as the "Asian Wall Street Journal", "Far Eastern Economic Review", "Time", "Newsweek" and "The Economist" can all attest to.

For example, the "Asian Wall Street Journal" was gazetted (so called because the restriction is announced in the weekly Government gazette) in 1987, and this led to a debate between the US State Department and Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The latter’s stance was, naturally, synonymous with the general PAP view: that foreign publications can be irresponsible because they do not have a stake in Singapore. The government said that it had “never undertaken any obligation to uphold a ‘free and unrestricted press’, let alone to accept the American definition of that term.”4 In a historian’s words, “the circulation of foreign journal was a privilege, not an automatic right”.5