Is the National Building Press slipping into brain washing?

(To increase the font – hold down the Ctrl key and keep pressing +) I don’t really know whether some of you may have noticed this. Maybe I am just really slow at catching on to the game – or maybe I am just the trusting sort.

This is how it goes: as soon as a point of view is forwarded by someone from government – then what happens the following day is the apparatus of assimilation i.e ST and Mediacorpse et al goes into over drive and goes all the way to substantiate the point made by the politician by selective reporting.

Take for example our abysmal baby birth rates. Recently it was mentioned by Big Daddy Lee and what was the follow up by our beloved rag? Well today an article laments the same trend in countries like Japan, Taiwan, Korea etc – but what I consider disingenuous about all this is how thoroughly the ST has managed to elide worthy examples in France, Scandinavia and even our neighbor up North that it’s possible to reverse this trend by rolling out holistic policies which are able to strike a happy balance between work, life and play.

Granted population dynamics is a complex business – and Singapore I am sure is no exception to this rule. Only I don’t see the point of showcasing “failed” cases that merely reinforce the myth the baby blues cannot be reversed. Truth is they can be reversed and the question here is simply this: why wasn’t the other side of the argument fully discussed?

As a strong correlation between fertility rates generally decline as development rises, and this has indeed been happening in most industrialized nations. Birthrates in Italy, Germany, and Japan, for instance, have dipped to 1.3 children or fewer per woman. But recently a team of sociologists in the United States and Italy revealed a twist in this pattern. When development—measured by income, education, and life span—improves past a certain point, they find, fertility picks up again. The study was published in August in the journal Nature.

Darkness 2010 – The Brotherhood

“If you speak to people like Cherian George. He will tell you that one reason why we do not have a free press is because the government does not allow the ST to write freely – so what this two short planks of an academic is trying to say is the chicken came before the egg – as what he is really trying to say here is whether a newspaper is free or corseted is entirely a function of government attitudes – but what Cherian never ever told any of you is this –  if every government on this planet had its way, every single newspaper on this planet, even the Guardian and Le Monde would still be playing a nation building role, even today! – truth of the matter is no such conditions ever presented itself to any press on this planet as Cherian once described where a political order has handed the right to write freely to any newspaper on a silver platter- such a country never once existed, not in the Americas, Europe or for that matter any where else in the world, except in this fellows mind. In every case if you look very carefully at the history of newspapers – it’s independence and right to write has always been seized from the death grip of governments – so now you understand why I do not care very much for either Cherian or his logic….if he says, I am causing trouble by stirring up intellectual offence….then tell me why does he continue to cause thinking folk pain by saying the things he says?”

Darkness 2007 – Captured by an auto-bot in a secured thread in Ekunaba – The Brotherhood Press 2010