I contributed a letter to Today a day after the National Day Rally..

The National Day Rally is an annual speech by the Prime Minister, serving as a report card of the progress of our young country. It also serves as a rallying call to Singaporeans to prepare us for the greater challenges of the following year. Hence it is true to say that the NDR is a very important event.

However, is it absolutely necessary to broadcast the NDR simultaneously on all terrestrial channels? I can understand the need to have it translated into the 4 main languages, but surely Channel NewsAsia and Channel 5 would end up duplicating each other, and the same goes for Channel 8 and Channel U for the Mandarin channels?

I could not help but compare this to the paltry coverage of local sports on the terrestrial channels. It is saddening to see that the idea of local sports broadcast is live screenings of SLeague matches only once or twice a week, and the idea of sports on terrestrial TV is wrestling, the occasional golf tournament, and a few European soccer matches. I remember that about 10 years ago, we used to screen highlights of inter-school basketball finals on Channel 5. To make worse an already bad situation, the recent soccer match between Singapore and China was not screened at all.

I think it is high time that we start to place a little more emphasis on covering our local sports. We do have events of international standing that take place in Singapore throughout the year, for example the StanChart Singapore Marathon. Perhaps Mediacorp can consider opening up a channel that is only active during the time of the sports event. The remaining time can be utilized for public or educational broadcast.

The channel of course would hardly generate any advertising revenue or profit, but it is high time that we look beyond the profit motive and concentrate on the broadcast of a good mixture of local sporting events or overseas events where our national athletes are competing. Let us invest back some of the profits from the media industry, or the funds collected from TV licenses into this project. The Singapore Sports Council can consider collaborating with the media companies to bid for and screen the events, funded by a pool of money contributed by the media companies and the government. Let us realize that it is not just rallies by leaders of our country that are important in developing a strong social fabric in Singapore.

Now Today has a habit of publishing letters within 2-3 days if it’s worthy, or they get a reporter to contact you if they think your letter has the potential for it to become a proper story. However when ur letter is too lengthy, or PERHAPS doesnt match Today’s interest to be a paper that fosters nation-building, you get a canned reply like this:

From: xxx < @mediacorp.com.sg> Mailed-By: mediacorp.com.sg
To:
Date: Aug 31, 2006 5:53 PM
Subject: RE: TODAY VOICES CONTRIBUTION - NATIONAL DAY RALLY SPEECH
Thank you for your contribution to our VOICES section, but I’m afraid we aren’t able to use your letter.

Please however continue to send your views to TODAY. We try to use as many letters as possible, space permitting.

Once again, thank you for your interest in TODAY.

Best Regards,

xxx
Editorial Assistant
MediaCorp Press Ltd