SPH Media Trust, the publicly-financed publisher of The Straits Times, Singapore’s newspaper of record, and other daily broadsheets, is under parliamentary scrutiny after an internal review found the circulation numbers of its titles to be arbitrarily inflated by up to 95,000 copies, or about 10% to 12% of average daily circulation.
The Straits Times disclosed on January 9 several practices used to inflate circulation, including instances where copies of SPH Media titles were printed, counted for circulation and then destroyed. Lapsed contracts had continued to be counted in circulation data and a project account had even been injected with additional funding “to purchase fictitious circulation.”
The internal review covered circulation figures for the period spanning September 2020 to March 2022. Still, SPH Media has not said for how long such practices took place, nor has it named any of the staff involved, noting only that four employees had left the company over the incident in December while three staff had been served warning letters.
Not only have the revelations opened the publisher to legal action by advertisers and shareholders, but its taxpayer funding has been cast into uncertainty as well, with the Ministry of Communications and Information (MCI) undertaking a review of its decision to finance SPH Media to the tune of S$900 million (US$685 million) over a five-year period.
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Nile Bowie is a journalist and correspondent with the Asia Times covering current affairs in Singapore and Malaysia. He can be reached at nilebowie@gmail.com.
