My follow up to the TRS quality control issue

Hi everyone. Okay, I have received a very prompt response from TRS with regards to my last article "TRS: The Gutter Press, Bad Journalism and Lazy Writers". Firstly, allow me to cut and paste their comment.

TRS Admin26 February 2014 02:48

Hi Limpeh,

I agree with many of your points and I think your last few paragraphs adequately sums up our dilemma. We try to present the views of singaporeans, all singaporeans. We know that sometimes this can ruffle feathers. We don't necessarily agree with the article and in fact we publish many articles that are pro gay also.

Just because we do not agree with a view doesn't mean it doesn't exist or deserve to be heard. In fact, publishing these different views can promote healthy discussion and help others who hold similar views see the arguments made against them. This has already happened in the comments section of that article. If we simply block out the article, this discussion could not occur and we would be no different from the mainstream media which only publishes the views they want to see.

We always appreciate feedback and your article is a good response to the article too. We felt the need to respond on our position to you because you are one of our favorite bloggers :) Also, is it Ok if we publish this article to our website as another response to the SK Pang article?

This issue here is about quality control.

Here is my reply which I wanted to do write as a proper blog posts since I really wanted to include hyperlinks to the sources which I am citing in my post (and that's not easily done in the comments section) - I can include videos and photos in this format a lot easier and it makes for a more pleasant reading experience for my readers. 

This brings me right back to that module at university when I studied about Indian philosopher and feminist Gayatri Spivak trying to capture the voices of the women at the very bottom of the social ladder and their voices are rarely ever captured in Indian history - which focuses on the elite in Indian society, those who were educated and have power & money get to write Indian history; but Spivak ran into many of the problems that you're running into in her quest to capture the voices of the subaltern in Indian society. These people are uneducated, illiterate even, most are inarticulate, they are not eloquent and she had the dilemma of whether to 'translate' their words to a more presentable format for her audience in academia or leave it as it is, whilst taking the risk that her audience may reject her work or diminish its value. So this is not a new issue in academia, one that has no simple answers.

Spivak tried to capture the voices of the Indian subaltern.

My point is that it is not a matter of being pro or anti gay here: it is the lack of quality control by TRS. I have seen some very well written anti-gay articles written by highly educated, very articulate people who know exactly how to argue their case. Those are the people who worry me, not someone like SK Pang who clearly doesn't know how to cite sources in an essay - this is one of the first things they teach you in university when you start writing essays seriously after you've done loads of research and spent hours in the library reading up on the subject. Of course, not all university courses require that kind of essay writing skills - it is mostly those who do arts & social science, law and business degrees who have to write essays whilst those doing the pure sciences, engineering, medicine and mathematics probably rarely or never have to write a single essay whilst at university thus it is not a skill that all graduates would have.

SK Pang may be a grown man (a father with children) but his writing style resembles that of a 15 or 16 year old - ie. in an secondary school exam, all you do is regurgitate stuff you've memorized and have this verbal diarrhea in the exam. So the question in a geography or history exam would be like, "Explain the factors which contribute towards the growth in the use of renewable energy. (10)" That's when the young student starts writing down everything he can remember about renewable energy in a frenzy against the clock, in a bid to score 10 out of 10 marks for that question. If you've written something totally wrong or irrelevant, the teacher may go as far as to mark it with a cross but no marks would be deducted. If you're half-right, then you may get half a point and if you have written down something that is both true and relevant to the question, then you get a tick and a point. Now you can pose that same question to a university student but the approach would be very different - the university lecturer would definitely penalize you for writing anything that is untrue, inaccurate, incorrect, if you fail to cite your sources or provide all the relevant facts & figures in your case studies. A secondary school teacher probably will let you get away with it - and this just makes me think that SK Pang never did any kind of social science beyond secondary school and maybe he went into something like engineering and never had to write a proper essay in his life - that's why the results are so atrocious.

University students do a lot of research when writing an essay

There is a reason why respectable newspapers around the world only hire the very best journalists, in fact I was talking to one of my readers recently about her quest to get a job at SPH as a journalist and it is highly competitive - they only hire the very best talents. That is how you maintain the quality of a very good newspaper: they are worried about GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). It's about quality control: you hire lousy journalists, your articles will suck. Now you don't need to be a genius to understand that very basic principle.

Now this is exactly the trap TRS has fallen into - in trying hard to capture the voices of 'ordinary Singaporeans' you've allowed the standard of your articles to fall dramatically. Like I said, it's not a question of pro-gay vs anti-gay: it's a question of allowing people who clearly cannot write an article the chance to have a go at journalism (with disastrous results) and you're the one who suffers ultimately if you're trying to stimulate debate because a poorly written article simply turns people off, it doesn't stimulate debate as well as a well written article that is a pleasure to read. The answer? Quality control - strike a compromise between capturing authentic voices and maintaining a decent quality of articles so that your readers have a reasonably good experience. Do you enjoy reading a poorly written article? No, clearly not - nobody does. Heck, only teachers get paid good money to mark badly written essays and even then they get pissed off in the process: why are you subjecting your readers to the same torturous process? What is the point? What are your goals? What do you achieve insisting on capturing 'authentic voices' like that?

Nobody enjoys reading a really badly written article. 

Correct me if I am wrong here, but the TRS is rather anti-PAP or at least it is trying to address the balance in opinion in the official media (which is overwhelmingly pro-PAP). What kind of message are you sending to the PAP (and other Singaporean readers) if you fill the TRS website with poorly written articles by inarticulate Singaporeans who are simply incapable of presenting a cogent argument?  The message they walk away with is, "look at this so-called alternative media, it's worse than the gutter press, that's why you should leave proper journalism to the SPH, that's why we need the MDA Broadcast Act - at least the SPH journalists there know what they're doing, unlike these idiots who write for the TRS." Really, you're shooting yourself in the foot, you're really sabotaging your own efforts when you sacrifice quality control in favour of 'authenticity'. You don't need the PAP to tear you down when you're going into self-destruct mode like this - and all this time, the PAP is standing back and watching you make silly mistakes like that with glee.

So I feel you're missing my point actually - frankly I don't really mind/care if SK Pang is homophobic or not - that is not the issue here. My gripe is you have accepted and published a shockingly badly written article without batting an eyelid and there should have been an element of quality control on your part (as the chief editor of TRS) when dealing with all articles you receive. Where do you draw the line when it comes to poorly written articles? You really need to start implementing some basic quality control ASAP because simply having this free for all "we're capturing the voices of real Singaporeans" damages TRS badly, really badly. What is the point of TRS at the end of the day - you need to think about some very fundamental questions like that and allow those principles to guide your stance on this issue.

As usual, I invite everyone to respond on this issue - that's what the comments section below is for. Thanks for reading!
Update, please follow up here: http://limpehft.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/capturing-voices-of-sublatern-trs.html