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- <text id=90TT2846>
- <title>
- Oct. 29, 1990: Saying Goodbye To Mr. Lee
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1990
- Oct. 29, 1990 Can America Still Compete?
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- PRESS, Page 91
- Saying Goodbye to Mr. Lee
- </hdr>
- <body>
- <p>Dow Jones bails out of a long-running feud in Singapore
- </p>
- <p> "We'd like to express our regret," declared the editorial
- in last week's Wall Street Journal worldwide, "that we are
- suspending our remaining circulation in the Republic of
- Singapore." Daily copies of its Asian edition sold in the
- bustling Southeast Asian city-state, the piece noted, had
- already been cut by official edict from 5,000 to just 400. A
- new Singapore press law requiring foreign publications to be
- licensed annually and to post a deposit against legal judgments
- makes clear that "what the government of Singapore wants is
- for the foreign press to practice self-censorship," the
- editorial continued. "We cannot accept the implicit bargain."
- With that, the newspaper announced that it would no longer sell
- any copies in Singapore.
- </p>
- <p> The move leaves Singapore (pop. 2.7 million), one of the
- Pacific Rim's most dynamic centers, as that rarity, a
- non-Communist country without some edition of the far-flung
- financial newspaper (worldwide circ. more than 2 million). The
- Journal's decision also marks the latest step in a long-running
- feud between the island republic and foreign-based publications
- in general about the government's right to reply to coverage.
- The circulation of the Asian Wall Street Journal was cut in
- 1987, when the paper refused to print in full a lengthy
- government letter about an article on a proposed new stock
- exchange. Another Dow Jones & Co. publication, the Hong
- Kong-based weekly Far Eastern Economic Review, stopped
- Singapore distribution in 1988 after its circulation was
- crimped from 10,000 to 500.
- </p>
- <p> TIME too has had its problems. The magazine's circulation
- was cut from nearly 19,000 to 2,000 for seven months in 1987,
- after it failed to print promptly a government letter citing
- errors in a story about an opposition leader. The circulation
- of Asiaweek, a regional weekly owned by Time Warner, was cut
- from 11,000 copies to 500 in 1987 for similar reasons, then
- recently raised to 7,500.
- </p>
- <p> Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, a Cambridge law graduate who
- has run the former British colony since independence in 1965,
- makes no secret of his distrust of Western media and their
- influence. In a speech last week, Lee argued that TV news
- broadcasts, with their dramatic reports on protests in Korea
- and the Philippines, led to last year's Beijing student
- massacre. The broadcasts, he alleged, misled China's students
- into thinking they too could force speedy government change. As
- for his own government, Lee said, it "can and will insist on no
- foreign interference in the domestic politics of Singapore."
- </p>
- <p>By Jay Branegan/Hong Kong. With reporting by Leslie Whitaker/New
- York.
- </p>
-
- </body>
- </article>
- </text>
-
-