Ownership, Regulation and (A bit of) Content

Ownership, Regulation and Content
So who owns Razor TV? As mentioned in an earlier post, it was opened as part of The Straits Times online presence, which in turn is part of the AsiaOne Network owned by the SPH (SPH, 2009). While it has no direct ties with the Singapore Government in terms of ownership, one of SPH’s major shareholders is the DBS Group (SPH, 2008b) which in turn is partially owned by Temasek Holdings, an investment company owned by the Singapore Government (Temasek Holdings, 2008). Further analysis by Chu & Wong has shown a more complex system of indirect ownership of SPH by Temasek Holdings (Chu & Wong, 2000). SPH in general is said to have “close ties to the PAP government” (Article 19, 2005).

Razor TV, as with other internet sites, is regulated by the MDA with a “light-touch regulatory approach” through the use of the Class License Scheme and the Internet Code of Practice among others (MDA, 2009).

Just as the Newspaper Printing and Presses Act make SPH newspapers practice self-censorship and self-regulation so as to allow it to “operate on the right track” in the definition of the government (Xu, 2005), MDA regulations have also affected Razor TV’s content and some of its content has been shown to include what Xu calls “Asian values” in journalism.

So here is an example of “nation-building”, one of the factors in Xu’s “Asian values.

As part of its National Day 2009 coverage, Razor TV made a special tribute video about Singaporeans taking part in the National Day’s Pledge Moment, where Singaporean around the world took the pledge at exactly 8.22PM on Sunday, 9th of August. This video, in a nutshell, represents a show of unity from Singaporeans around the world.