Media bias in Singapore in 2011

• Main Authors: Lee, Matthew Wenjun, Michell Devina Ngan, Park So Jin
• Other Authors: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/66399
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In this paper, we studied whether the media reporting of Parliamentary Seatings by The Straits Times, Singapore’s highest selling paper, favoured certain Members-of-Parliament in articles published by the aforementioned paper in 2011 where the Opposition was elected to Parliament. The premise of the paper is centred on studies by Stromberg (2004), Gentzkow and Shapiro (2004), Gentzkow (2006), Gerber, Karlan and Bergan (2009) that newspaper content is said to have significant influence on perceived political attitudes. Should a political party be poised to promote itself through mainstream media, it may be able to sway public political opinion, and thus, voting patterns. We explored the extent of The Straits Times newspaper reporting in relationship to the actual content documented in official Parliamentary seatings. The research questions which our project aims to address are: 1. Did the Straits Times report on selective Members of Parliament in Parliament Seatings in 2011 to 2012 2. Who did the Straits Times selectively allocate word count to during the time period 3. What were the reasons for the observed reporting in the The Straits Times In our results, we are able to show statistically, that the Straits Times was not biased against the minority of both the Opposition and Nominated Members-of-Parliament based on word count attribution. Intuitively, the induced demand from readers of the paper could have spiked due to the spurred debate and increased diversity of motions propositioned between Members-of-Parliament during the novel year of the Opposition’s election to Parliament. We also show that there were certain topics which Members-of-Parliament ultimately spoke more or less about in Parliament debates, where Ministerial ranking and the topic for discussion played a key role in influencing word counts in both Hansard, and ultimately, the reported Straits Times article for both paraphrases and quotes.