On this rainy and dreary morning, a letter in the Forum section of ST woke me up. Its title read:

THE A*STAR SAGA
Anarchy if people speak without a care for truth

There! I thought. Someone has come forward to lambast a certain chairman for his high-handed tactics and dubious comments... and ST actually published the letter!

Right. If something is too good to be true, it probably isn't.

The letter was actually about The AcidFlask Incident. For those who have been hiding in a cave... on Pluto... and was totally comatose, AcidFlask was threatened with a libel lawsuit by the chairman of A*STAR, who wanted him to remove certain posts from his blog.

One matter to clarify:

...it appears that he was given an opportunity to make an apology. The initial apology was considered inadequate by A*Star and the threat of a libel lawsuit persuaded him to make an unreserved apology.

As far as I know of, the libel lawsuit itself was the "opportunity" for AcidFlask to apologize and remove his posts. Mr. William Ho's letter appears to imply that the lawsuit threat came after a recalcitrant apology by AcidFlask, who was originally given an "opportunity", by means other than a lawsuit threat, to make an apology.

Call me pedantic, but this makes a big difference.

Mr. Ho continues to write:

Freedom of expression must be accompanied by a responsibility to have your facts correct, and, if they are proven otherwise, to have the maturity to admit you are wrong, make an unreserved apology and move on.

It will be total anarchy if we have freedom of speech without the need to speak the truth. Every individual has a right to his opinion, but no individual has a right to be wrong in his facts.

The larger issue here is not of veracity and truthfulness in speech or writing. To focus solely on this trivializes the debate and ignores the point that many are trying to make. Did Chris Choo not realize that there should be "a care for truth" when people speak or write? I don't think so. Ironically enough, Choo's original letter to the ST includes the phrase "missing the woods for the trees", which is what I feel Mr. Ho has done.

It is not merely speaking with "a care for truth" that determines how civil a society is- it is also important to gauge how we react to alleged misrepresentations of the truth. Do we litigate at the first opportunity available? Do we browbeat dissenters into submission? Do we withhold information from the public because libel cannot be repeated (I'm no lawyer, but Google turns out nothing on this)?

Litigation at the first possible opportunity is a knee-jerk reaction that is reminiscent of authoritarianism. Browbeating convinces nobody that your standpoint is right. Withholding information creates more ambiguity and robs the public of the ability to judge for themselves what was truthful and what was not, the effect of which is further exacerbated when the apology itself is more well-publicised by the agency than the specific reasons for litigation. The end result is that AcidFlask is unfairly associated with an entire letter on anarchy, even when Mr. Ho admits he is "not privy to the exchange" but still sees fit to insinuate who was in the wrong.

Innocent until proven guilty? Apparently not.

Finally, Mr. Ho writes:

Nothing lowers the level of conversation more than raising the voice.

There are many ways to raise a voice- decibels is but one measure. [full letter found in the comments of this post]

Filed under: Singapore, Politics