S’pore press gang days over, says ex-ST editor

Those good old days?

Singapore is done with handling the press by grabbing it by the throat as it used to do in the “knuckleduster days” of the 1970s, according to the Straits Times’s former editor Cheong Yip Seng.

He does not expect the current government resorting to the Internal Security Act against journalists and said he felt the government would become “less heavy-handed” over time, and would no longer close down a newspaper.

Speaking at the launch of his memoirs on Friday, Cheong said even the “favourite instrument” of the government, to change editors in the newsroom, would be less effective over time.

His 432-page memoirs, entitled OB Markers: My Straits Times Story, recounts his 43 years as a newspaperman. He began as a cadet reporter in 1963, rising to be editor-in-chief in 1987, in which post he remained until retirement in 2006.