Whenever I see some Singaporeans whine about how the government is allegedly controlling the media I both laugh and cry.
Do you even read the garbage they publish? This is not journalism, this isn't even reporting - which should entail simply relaying information as it is presented at the source, without bias or prejudice.
It often sounds like the local media outlets were hijacked by opposition supporters desperately trying to frame the government.
Now, we know this to be the case in some private outlets but how the hell does this garbage make its way into the public ones?
All I can read in the "news" up and down Singapore is how retrenchments doubled in 2023, to about 14,000 last year.
But those very same reports either only casually mention that unemployment hasn't actually changed or don't mention it at all, and none of them say that it is firmly at pre-pandemic levels, with some of the figures at the lowest in at least 10 years.
None of these reports makes a peep about the fact that throughout the year the number of vacancies kept hovering around 80,000 to 90,000 per quarter. This is against retrenchments of around 4,000+ per quarter.
None of them relays the past figures, showing that annual retrenchments in Singapore in years before the pandemic were within 10,000 to 20,000 range.
None of them mentions the fact that Singapore has not only recouped all of the jobs lost in the pandemic but already added 200,000 more, in just 3 years.
Somehow the news is about doubling of the rate of retrenchments against a RECORD LOW 2022, despite it being perfectly within the range registered in the past.
Retrenchments are a fact of life – business reality in different companies changes, they face different challenges and have to adjust their headcounts.
How exactly is e.g. a global wave of layoffs in tech companies indicative of Singapore's economic situation?
The problem is never the fact that some people have to be let go but whether they can quickly re-enter the labour force – which they absolutely can in Singapore.
But somehow the news headlines don't make a mention of that, not even in allegedly state-controlled outlets, which instead chose to cherry-pick a single stat, presenting it out of context and making a story out of it.
Anybody who claims the government controls the local media should try reading what they publish.
