A literary mystery.

A recent break in Thailand set me a bit of a mystery. Why is the Bangkok Post such a good newspaper?

I picked up a copy of the Bangkok Post while sitting in a hotel lobby in Chiangmai. I didn't expect much of it. After all, Thailand is a country of patchy literacy at best. In North-Eastern Thailand, for instance, only 58% of people are able to read. (This according to an article in the Bangkok Post). Therefore, it was something of a surprise to find myself reading literate, well-written, thoughtful articles with a...and this was the biggest surprise...global perspective. The Bangkok Post, despite having a local style title, was not a local newspaper, in the restricted sense of the word, but an international newspaper.

The Bangkok Post contained feature articles on international figures, in-depth articles on Thai issues - but also articles on world issues. The articles had been written with insight and thoughtfulness and actually seemed "meaty", in the reading.

As I read, I found myself comparing it to the newspapers of Singapore. By contrast, the Singaporean newspapers seem parochial, narrow in focus and local in flavour. They do not really look deeply into international matters, the articles are superficial and contain little real thinking (except those articles which they appropriate from international sources). The Singaporean newspapers seem to be poorly written by comparison to what I read in the Bangkok Post, in general and seem to contain less of actual substance.

Now, this is a mystery to me. The level of literacy in Singapore is 95.7%. Yet, the newspapers are a shallower read than what the Bangkok Post offers. Something is wrong here. Surely, the newspapers of Singapore should be more literate, better written, thoughtful and insightful than those of a much less developed nation, Thailand? Yet, it is not so. The Bangkok Post is a better read than any Singaporean paper (at least on the samples I read, which are probably average ones). This suggests something interesting. Though literacy is not universal in Thailand, there is a minority whose literacy exceeds that of the typical Singaporean newspaper writer. There is also a minority whose thinking is more insightful than that of a typical Singaporean newspaper writer. The result is that, although less developed and less literate on average, the Thais manage to produce a newspaper of greater excellence than is managed in Singapore.

There is a lesson in this. Singapore's media can do better. If Thailand can do such a good job, with less resources and a lower literacy base, surely Singapore can up its game. We have to wonder, however, why Singapore's newspapers are so indifferent in quality. Perhaps it is policy. Perhaps it is a choice that has been made to produce papers of modest literacy, limited insight and a local perspective. However, having seen what a third world neighbour can do, I am left unsatisfied with Singapore's efforts.

It is time for Singapore to have a media that matches its stature as a developed nation that is officially the tenth most expensive place to live on Earth. Singapore can start by trying to write a paper as good as the Bangkok Post. However, it might take them some time to catch up...

(If you would like to learn more of Ainan Celeste Cawley, a scientific child prodigy, aged eight years and seven months, or his gifted brothers, Fintan, five years exactly, and Tiarnan, twenty-eight months, please go to:http://scientific-child-prodigy.blogspot.com/2006/10/scientific-child-prodigy-guide.html I also write of gifted education, IQ, intelligence, the Irish, the Malays, Singapore, College, University, Chemistry, Science, genetics, left-handedness, precocity, child prodigy, child genius, baby genius, adult genius, savant, wunderkind, wonderkind, genio, гений ребенок prodigy, genie, μεγαλοφυία θαύμα παιδιών, bambino, kind.

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