Last night, i was fuming in front of my TV set. 7 free-to-air TV channels. 8 paid cable channels dedicated to sports.
And none of them is broadcasting Singapore’s World Cup 2010 qualifier against Saudi Arabia live.
What on Earth is this about? Didn’t i pay my annual TV licence fee of S$110? Didn’t i submit, against my better judgement, to Starhub CableTV’s demand to raise the sport package’s price to S$26.75 per month – an increase of 67%?
And we’re not talking about baseball or golf here. No offence to these sports but football is most passionately-supported in Singapore. If you ever doubt that, just turn up at the Kallang stadium whenever the Lions play competitively.
12 hours later, my anger had subsided but questions remained. Where does my annual TV licence payment go? In fact, why is there a need for TV licence fee?
According to figures published by the Singapore Department of Statistics, there were 246 TV licences for every 1,000 resident population in 2007. Total resident population as of 2007 was 3.583 million. After some simple calculations, i arrived at this grand figure: S$97 million were collected from TV licences last year. If i assume conservatively that 50% of the non-residents also pay TV licence fees, another S$27.2 million would have flowed into the coffer. Who’s coffer i know not. What i do know is that it’s a lot of public money.
Why do we need a TV licence?
After a little online sleuthing, i discovered that the annual TV license fees were managed by the Media Development Authority of Singapore (MDA).
According to the MDA, “TV Licence fees help to fund selected TV programmes to ensure that our population has access to a more balanced and wider range of Public Service Broadcast (PSB) programmes. PSB programmes include current affairs, info-educational, cultural, quality drama, children’s and minority language programmes. They reflect local values and concerns. Such programmes often serve to inform and educate the general public about important social, community and economic issues and policies.”
In other words, MDA collects the money and distributes it to fund programmes deemed by some higher power to be good for nation-building (i can’t argue with that) and which benefit the public.
To me, using public funds for such purposes makes sense. In fact, one reason commonly used to justify the TV licence was that it allowed the production of programmes that would otherwise not be commercially viable. Think Vasantham Central, a channel that serves our Indian community which incidentally makes up all of 9% of our resident population. Without such public funding, programmes meant for minority groups or are not “popular” may not survive the marketplace.
But are we served well by the money we spent?
MediaCorp
Since MediaCorp is the broadcast monopoly here, i assume that most, if not all of the fund, goes there. So what kind of quality programmes are we served up?
This is what a typical weekday program on TCS 5, cream of MediaCorp’s crop of TV channels, looks like.
13 Feb 2008
06:00 PM The Tyra Banks Show III (Variety)
07:00 PM Belles In Action (Info/Education)
07:30 PM Lifewise (Drama)
08:00 PM Mr Bean (Variety)
08:30 PM America’s Funniest Home Videos All Animal Extravaganza (Variety)
09:30 PM News 5 Tonight (News)
10:00 PM American Idol VII (Variety)
12:00 AM Boston Legal III (Drama)
4 out of 6 hours were set aside for “variety” programmes – those no-brainers that most people like to watch after a hectic day.
Mr. Bean used to be funny – when it first aired locally 15 years ago.
America’s Funniest Home Videos All Animal Extravaganza. Do the producers really believe in the comic power of video clips, dozens of them in different settings, showing cats playing with babies or dogs chasing after mouse? Please.
And Boston what?? For your info, Boston Legal II was ranked a dismal 47 in a viewers rating survey (as if such ratings are believeable in the first place). For you legions of Boston Legal fans out there, Boston Legal III was aired a long time ago in the US, between Sep 06 and May 07.
And to top it off, these are “prime-time” programmes. I shudder thinking about the drivel served up during non prime-time TV. (Confession: i subscribe to cable TV).
Where does the money go?
But to ask questions regarding the quality of the programmes is perhaps barking up the wrong tree altogether.
When Bob Woodward, the Washington Post investigative reporter, was tasked to dig up the truth behind Watergate, Deep Throat bestowed upon him a timeless advice that had since served countless investigative reporters well:
“Follow the money”
I applied his nugget of wisdom and looked for reports showing how the S$97 million was used. Can’t find any.
I also tried looking for MediaCorp’s annual reports. There are none – or at least none published online.
Questions unanswered
- How much money was given to local broadcaster(s) to carry out the duties of a “public broadcaster”?
- How much of those money was used to fund quality, meaningful programmes in line with MDA’s stated policy?
- How do we measure the returns on those public money – a huge sum by any measure?
- Why am i watching rubbish on TV when supposedly a large part, if not all, of my TV licence contribution goes to our cherished broadcast monopoly?
Can anyone shed some light on these questions?
S$110
In some European countries, e.g. Germany, the unemployed and disabled do not need to pay their licence fee. In Singapore, as far as i know, this “tax” is levied on anyone who uses his TV to watch free-to-air programmes.
In a report on Household Income Trend published last year, about 5.7% of Singaporean household has a monthly income of less than S$1,000. For such a household, the TV licence fee thus constitutes almost 1% of its income. In this group, many earned well below S$1,000. For cleaners and labourers, their median monthly starting pay fell 30 per cent between 1996 and 2006 – from $860 to $600.
An average office cleaner’s starting pay is only a meagre S$500. The S$9 per month (S$110/12mths) that you and i take for granted can jolly well mean 3 days’ worth of bus rides and 6 meals for them.
These are precisely the people who’d benefit most from “public” broadcast programmes.
