Hong Kong’s largest video billboard, Causeway Bay, shot from the back of a tram. – January 2023.
Me
I am a professor at the Hong Kong Baptist University’s School of Communication, writing on media and politics. You can contact me via the form at the bottom of my bio page.
Interests
My research and writing focus on:
Hate propaganda and disinformation: How intolerance and hate are used in political contention, threatening freedom and equality around the world.
Media freedom and censorship: How journalism around the world struggles to serve the public interest in the face of external and internal threats.
Singapore media and politics: The governing party’s authoritarian resilience and hegemonic control of political expression.
Out now
Hong Kong media freedom after the crackdown: I have a chapter in a volume on the National Security Law edited by Fu Hualing and Michael Khor (HKU Press, 2022). They also organised a conference in June 2021 for authors to discuss their chapters. My conference presentation is here. My essay on the same topic has been published in Global Media Journal.
Red Lines: Political Cartoons and the Struggle against Censorship was a finalist in the Media & Cultural Studies and Graphic Nonfiction categories of the Association of American Publishers PROSE Awards honoring scholarly works published in 2021.
Published by the MIT Press, it is a global study of 21st century censorship as experienced by political cartoonists around the world. It is rendered entirely in graphic form, in collaboration with comic book artist Sonny Liew. Urban Comics will publish the French edition. Visit our website.
The power and precarity of the pencil: Taking as a point of departure the New York Times‘s extraordinary decision to stop running editorial cartoons entirely, my chapter examining the economic and professional precarity of political cartooning appears in the new volume Newswork in Precarity, edited by Kalyani Chadha and Linda Steiner.
My article co-authored with Yuan Zeng, “The Ghosts of Newspapers Past: Public Interest Journalism as Movement” has been published in the International Journal of Communication. Our study of journalism in China, Taiwan and Indonesia suggestst that the ethos of public interest journalism can be kept alive even when news organisations die and the environment turns inhospitable. Committed journalists find ways to sustain that ethos by acting like a social movement.
Together with political scientists Chong Ja Ian and Walid Jumblatt Abdullah, I probe the tendency among some Singaporeans to treat the crisis in Ukraine as an occasion to assert their values and allegiances in an identity war between the West and the Rest. Our article “Ukraine and big power rivalry: Why the urge to ‘compare rottenness’ will lead Singapore nowhere” was published in AcademiaSG.
Current projects
Countering polarisation: This new project extends my “hate spin” research. It will examine how progressive media, human rights defenders, national equality commissions, and other actors are trying to promote principles of equality and pluralism to push back against the majoritarian intolerance that accompanies exclusionary forms of populism and nationalism.
Global diversity in media studies: Together with Saba Bebawi, Silvio Waisbord and Herman Wasserman, I’ve started a Global Media Studies Network, which aims to accelerate de-westernisation and de-colonisation of the field of media studies. Read the text of my talk on this subject at the International Communication Association 2022 conference, and a blog analysing the field’s top-ranked journals.
Talks, Interviews
In October, I gave the closing talk at the 5th Singapore Literary Festival in New York City. This biennial event is organised by Singapore Unbound.
Hong Kong’s Ming Pao carried this profile and interview on 12 June 2022. I talked about regulating misinformation, and why the Hong Kong government should focus more on the polarised city’s trust deficit than on its truth deficit. – Read the interview (in Chinese).
Closing keynote, Future of Journalism Conference, Cardiff University, 24 September 2021. “Freedom of expression on shifting ground: Confessions of a lost liberal”. — Full text available here.
Historyogi Podcast: The history & effects of Singapore’s media regulation policies.
Recently published
“Hate propaganda has a history measurable in millennia, considerably longer than the digitally assisted misinformation that has triggered concern in recent years.” — My chapter on “Hate Propaganda” appears in The Routledge Companion to Media Disinformation and Populism edited by Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord.
Co-authored with Donald Low, PAP v PAP: The Party’s struggle to adapt to a changing Singapore was released in October 2020. A Chinese translation (below) has been published by Monsoon Books in Taiwan.
My book, Air-Conditioned Nation Revisited: Essays on Singapore Politics, was published by Ethos Books in February 2020. Download a chapter: “The Dogma Behind Pofma“.
• Please visit the My Publications page on this site for more.
Gallery
Selected commentaries
Hong Kong media freedom, two years after the crackdown. My colleagues and I have tabulated incidents related to Hong Kong’s media freedom since the promulgation of the National Security Law. View the archive.
World Press Freedom Day: Outnumbered and outgunned, public-interest journalism is losing to identity politics. Current media systems have no answer for toxic polarisation. A public service internet and public service media need to be on the agenda. My commentary for 360info.org.
Ukraine and big power rivalry – Why the urge to ‘compare rottenness’ will lead Singapore nowhere: Chong Ja Ian, Walid Jumblatt Abdullah and I probe the tendency among some Singaporeans to treat the crisis in Ukraine as an occasion to assert their values and allegiances in an identity war between the West and the Rest. Read our commentary.
Singapore’s media system overhaul: Singapore’s news media giant SPH will go non-profit, marking the end of the PAP government’s neoliberal approach to suppressing the press. It will use public funds instead. Read my commentary.
The future of media freedom in Hong Kong: My essay in Global Media Journal. Read.
Race and the PAP: A chapter from PAP v PAP on the what needs to change in Singapore’s management of cultural diversity.
Section 298 of Singapore’s Penal Code is a bad law that promotes offence-taking instead of tolerance; it needs to go. Read my commentary.
A call for clean online campaigning: Singapore’s online falsehoods law fails to regulate social media manipulation by the ruling party. Read this call for more transparency by a multidisciplinary team of experts.
Stay in touch
My other sites
