Asian Media Seen Still Far Behind West

Asian print and broadcast media lag behind their Western counterparts, although quality media are not vital for doing business in the region, a report said on Sunday.

Virtually every Asian country is considered to have inferior print and broadcast media coverage compared with Western countries, said a report by the Hong Kong-based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy Ltd (PERC).

The group surveyed 265 expatriate executives working in Asia for their views on the quality of media in the countries where they are working, and graded the press on a scale of zero for the highest and 10 for the worst.

 

China received the worst grade, according to the report which covered Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea, Thailand, Japan, India, Taiwan, the Philippines, Hong Kong and China.

China received an average score of 8.86 points and suffered criticism for high censorship and the overall quality of local print and broadcast news.

Singapore's media also rated badly, with a censorship score second only to China's at 7.59 points. Malaysia received the third worst grading on censorship.

Well known for its authoritarian ways, the PAP (Singapore's People's Action Party) government presides over a thriving and relatively open economy in which the channels of information are carefully controlled, the report said.

This contrasted sharply with the Philippines, where a constitutional guarantee on media freedoms led to the best censorship rating of the countries surveyed, followed by Hong Kong and Taiwan.

But freedom does not guarantee quality. Both printed and broadcast media in the Philippines received only middling grades for quality, the report said.

For overall quality of print media coverage, Hong Kong ranked first, followed by Thailand and India. The top countries for broadcast media were India and Japan, the report said.

China recorded the worst marks for overall quality of print media, followed by South Korea and Singapore. In the broadcast area, China was also last, followed by Singapore and South Korea, it said.

But having poor quality media appeared unrelated to the overall business environment.

The facts of Singapore's economic development speaks for themselves. Foreign companies have found the Lion City an attractive place from which to conduct regional business, the group said.

Another example where quality media coverage may not be so vital is China.

Despite the information vacuum, China has been the leading recipient of direct foreign investment of any country in Asia for years now, the group said.

The market may not be transparent, but foreign companies do not need a journalist to tell them that potential demand in China for whatever product they are selling is so large that they cannot afford not to try to work their way through the maze.