SINGAPORE – SPH Media Trust, the publicly-financed publisher of The Straits Times, Singapore’s newspaper of record, and other daily broadsheets, is under parliamentary scrutiny after an internal review found the circulation numbers of its titles to be arbitrarily inflated by up to 95,000 copies, or about 10% to 12% of average daily circulation.
The Straits Times disclosed on January 9 several practices used to inflate circulation, including instances where copies of SPH Media titles were printed, counted for circulation and then destroyed. Lapsed contracts had continued to be counted in circulation data and a project account had even been injected with additional funding “to purchase fictitious circulation.”
The internal review covered circulation figures for the period spanning September 2020 to March 2022. Still, SPH Media has not said for how long such practices took place, nor has it named any of the staff involved, noting only that four employees had left the company over the incident in December while three staff had been served warning letters.
Not only have the revelations opened the publisher to legal action by advertisers and shareholders, but its taxpayer funding has been cast into uncertainty as well, with the Ministry of Communications and Information (MCI) undertaking a review of its decision to finance SPH Media to the tune of S$900 million (US$685 million) over a five-year period.
The ministry will also be conducting its own review to determine if the inconsistencies in circulation data ultimately affected the government’s decision and the amount committed to fund SPH Media. MCI says it has not yet disbursed any of the S$900 million it pledged last year as an investment in the publisher to aid its “digital era” transformation.
Minister for Communications and Information Josephine Teo is scheduled to field questions from government and opposition lawmakers when Parliament convenes on February 6. Among the questions expected to be asked are whether the ministry will downgrade its funding commitments to the publisher and whether a police probe should be launched into those allegedly involved.
“Based on the very limited disclosures by SPH Media, what had taken place are, minimally, severe ethical breaches and corporate wrongdoing. There’s not enough information in the public domain to determine if crimes had been committed,” Eugene Tan, an associate professor of law at Singapore Management University (SMU), told Asia Times.
“Certainly, the transgressions are not mere errors or administrative oversight. The deliberateness with which the impugned actions had been taken suggests that it is not a mere case of low-level executives cooking the figures but that the misconduct could not have been done without the knowledge or implicit consent of senior executives gone rogue,” he added.
SPH Media took a “painful but necessary” decision to make its inaccurate circulation figures public because the organization could not “possibly continue reporting numbers that would be questioned,” according to the publisher’s editor-in-chief Wong Wei Kong, who made the remarks in an internal memo cited in local media reports.
“Whatever we say, we have taken a blow to our reputation and credibility, the values that drive a news organization… All this was painful, but necessary to put right what was once unknown, but now known,” Wong wrote and added that he expected SPH Media to get “a lot of stick” as “more things may come out” without elaborating.
SPH Media’s board has asked its audit and risk committee to commission legal advisers to assist in further investigating the inflated circulation numbers and decide on what steps should be taken. The publisher initiated the internal review in March 2022 following its split from mainboard-listed company Singapore Press Holdings Limited (SPHL) in December 2021.
The review covered a period that included a full financial year under SPHL from September 2020 to August 2021, two quarters – from September 2021 to November 2021 – when the media business was still part of the listed company, as well as from December 2021 to March 2022, when SPH Media had become a not-for-profit entity, or company limited by guarantee (CLG).
The regulator and operator of Singapore’s stock market, the Singapore Exchange (SGX) Group, has said it is reviewing the “materiality and time of occurrence” of the circulation data falsification, referring to information that is likely to affect a company’s share price, given that SPHL was a listed company for a portion of the review period.
Circulation data, which refers to the number of copies of a newspaper or magazine publicly distributed, is one metric that may be used as a price benchmark through which a publication can charge advertisers for ad space and may also be considered by investors deciding whether or not to buy shares in a media company.
After advertisers reached out to SPH Media for clarity following the disclosure, chief executive Teo Lay Lim reportedly replied by email claiming that circulation data is not used as a basis for the company’s advertising packages and is instead determined by data on reach and readership, which is collected periodically via a survey panel verified by third-party research agencies.
The publisher has yet to clarify what its circulation numbers are used for and the impact the misrepresented figures may have had. Law professor Tan said SPH Media will be under pressure by ongoing investigations but would likely seek a resolution in order not to lose advertisers’ business. He added that “legal repercussions and lawsuits are within the realm of possibility.”
PN Balji, one of the country’s most respected former newspaper editors, spent the bulk of his decades-long career at SPH, undertaking roles at its various publications from the 1970s to 2000. He told Asia Times that he believed the publisher was under tremendous pressure to produce healthier circulation figures, particularly for The Straits Times.
“The fact is that this has been talked about, rumored about, whispered about for a while, for many years, even when I was there 20 years ago. So, in that sense initially, when I learned of the story, it didn’t come as a surprise to me. The people who were involved in this were just carrying on a practice that has been going on for a long while,” the veteran editor suggested.
Balji added that, despite the incident, the government would likely continue funding the publisher, which enjoys an effective monopoly over the local newspaper market, given the “depth of feeling” for publications like The Straits Times, which he said Singapore’s modern founder Lee Kuan Yew had likened to “a porcelain vase that had to be protected and nurtured at all costs.”
Some see The Straits Times as embodying Lee’s view that media should serve as a conduit for nation-building rather than as an adversarial fourth estate. The English-language daily was the third most-trusted local news brand, according to the Reuters Institute 2022 Digital News Report. While 70% said they trust the paper, only 22% believe local media is free from government influence.
SMU’s Tan said the withdrawal of state funding for the publisher is unlikely “given that there is no other media company that can step up and take the place of SPH Media.” The law professor added it would be reasonable to expect that MCI would “require that measures be put in place by SPH Media to ensure that the various figures it provides are reliable.”
“Much is and will be expected of SPH Media to get its house in order and to ensure that there is no repeat of the corporate wrongdoing. It’s not enough to attribute the wrongdoing to a few bad apples – there must be remedial measures put in place and regularly audited to ensure that the safeguards are robust,” Tan told Asia Times.
Follow Nile Bowie on Twitter at @NileBowie