Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Respect and Professionalism

Lately an incident in the arts community here has become a topic of discussion. A Straits Times reporter, having sat through only 10 minutes into a performance for the Singapore Theatre Festival, wrote a review on that performance which was filled with inaccuracies and misleading information. This sparked some unhappiness among some local theatre practitioners, and I felt equally upset. Where has the professionalism of this reporter went to? I'm sure he should have learnt at some point of his academic life that one need to have thorough research before he even write a thesis, report, review, whatever, and in this case, shouldn't he write only after he had finished the show? It is downright disrespectful of the performance and its production crew to write a review based on simply assumption of what would happen for the next 9/10 of the performance which the reporter had missed. To put it on an even simpler term, I'm sure at least he's heard of the phrase "do not judge a book by his cover", and sadly, this was what he did. The more disappointing fact was that the Straits Times weren't even a single bit apologetic towards this incident; all they did was to put a small disclaimer in the papers stating that the review was not "incomplete" as the reviewer did not finish the show. Is that all the Straits Times have to say to this incident? What about the discourse of professional ethics which was obviously left out? A lecturer of mine once told my class that sometimes she got upset when she reads the Life! section of the Straits Times because of the shallowness of the contents, and now I can understand (I haven't read the local papers for ages since I do not like the style of it). At this point of writing, I understand some theatre practitioners have started sending letters to the press to voice their unhappiness (sadly I didn't, as I know well enough my linguistic power only allows me to diss in my own blog), and I believe as usual, the management of the Straits Times will jump up from their cosy armchairs to react accordingly, as what has been done before for other similar and/ or not-so-similar happenings. Or will they not do anything? We shall see...

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