In the second program, Development Journalism, two Singaporeans, former solicitor general Francis Seow and Opposition leader Dr Chee Soon Juan were interviewed.

Among Malaysians interviewed about the situation in their country was Chandra Muzaffar human rights activist and deputy president of the opposition National Justice Party in Malaysia.

This program on Development Journalism deals with the post-independence period of Southeast Asian nations. It was a time characterised by uneven economic development and varying degrees of authoritarianism.

This period saw close control of the media including outright censorship. The rationales for this included nation-building, the need for development and the difficulty of maintaining political stability.

Transcripts of the programs are released progressively at the ABC website: http://www.abc.net.au/ra/media/

The full transcript for Program 2: Development Journalism, broadcast on March 17, is available at http://www.abc.net.au/ra/media/radio/s257121.htm

What follows is part of the transcript dealing with Singapore. The intereviewer is Peter Mares of the ABC.

DR CHEE: People come to Singapore and see that oh it's very clean, it's rich and so on and so forth and it's the idea there's a golden cage. Other people see the gold. I see the cage and that's important as a human being for me in order to live as a human being to want it to continue to champion for what is very basic to us and that's freedom.

MARES: Dr Chee Soon Juan, Secretary-General of the Democratic Party, one of two opposition parties in Singapore.

Dr Chee is not an MP, but an active campaigner for the rights of Singapore's citizens to freely participate in politics both inside and outside parliament.

Dr Chee details the controls which inhibit press freedom in the country.

DR CHEE: Well for starters you have the Newspaper and Printing Presses Act which stipulates that no one individual can own more than 3 per cent of a newspaper company and you had in the past newspapers being closed down. We've got dailies and tabloids that were shut down. At the moment, everything has just been amalgamated under one company and that's called the Singapore Press Holdings which publishes all the dailies in Singapore. It's chairman is a (former) cabinet minister. It's (earlier chairman, Singapore's present) president is a former director of the secret police. Journalists have been regularly - foreign as well as local - have been taken to court and been sued. Either that or the local ones have been detained without trial and forced to make confessions that they were glamourising communism or supporting Marxism and under that guise been intimidating journalists and ultimately just erradicating any kind of dissent that may come about through the media.

MARES: Chee Soon Juan.

Francis Seow was Solicitor General in Singapore between 1969 and 1971. It was during his term as President of the Law Society in 1986 that he had a falling out with Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew.

Two years later in 1988 Francis Seow was accused of receiving funds from the US government to enter opposition poltics. He was arrested and held for 72 days under the Internal Security Act, which allows for indefinite detention without trial. Francis Seow now lives in exile in the United States and is a visiting fellow at Harvard Law School.

SEOW: The honeymoon between him and me ended when I became the President of the Law Society of Singapore. I was trying to get the Law Society to be active in various matters, especially in legislation. There was so much legislation that was being churned out that there was no proper debate either in the newspapers or even amongst the lawyers and I felt that the lawyers are the best people to show interest it. Because we are the people who interpret the law and if we could give our 10 cents worth as it were of pending legislation to the government, the government will be the richer for it at least that was what I thought and maybe I was naive at the time. But he passed the legislation to remove that clause in the legal professions act. Do you realise that the Law Society today has got no powers at all to comment on legislation? Now this is monstrous, absolutely scandalous and for that I was ousted as president of the Law Society under various pretexts of his. But what they did was they amended the law to this effect that the Law Society may not comment on legislation pending or otherwise unless the government ask it for its views.

MARES: Frances Seow documents how the government took effective control of the media in his recent book, The Media Enthralled - Singapore Revisited'. He believes the crackdown on the media can be traced back to 1971, when the ruling People's Action Party or PAPA, moved against three local newspapers.

The government accused the newspapers of irresponsibility. In other words, they were not meeting the ideal of development journalism, as defined by the government of Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew.

SEOW: After having sounded alarm bells that the media was being irresponsible in these various publications. He then moved against them. One was the Berita Harian which was the Malaysia language newspaper. But look that Malay language newspaper was owned by the Straits Times group and it very quickly corrected itself and there was no problem.

The Chinese language paper was the Nanyang Siang Pau'. Now that was owned by a man called Lee Eu Seng - from a very wealthy Lee family, and several senior editorial staff were arrested and detained under the Internal Security Act, including Lee Eu Seng's brother, Lee Mau Seng, who incidentally was arrested in the mistaken belief that he was actually Lee Eu Seng. So they continued to detain Lee Mau Seng for I think three years before they allowed him to leave to emigrate to Canada. But Lee Eu Seng took the PAP on and whilst he was the managing editor he fought tooth and nail against Lee Kuan Yew through his editorial columns. And the story of how he crushed the Singapore Herald would take to long to tell. And I'm sorry to say they all lost you see.

LEE KUAN YEW: I'm not interested what New York Times or Wall Street Journal says and they report Singapore every now and again to an American audience. But I do object when the Asian Wall Street Journal reports regularly, daily to a Singapore readership with the intention of influencing Singapore opinion and the way issues are decided. They take sides. They are participants. They got no right to participate that's my simple position.

MARES: Singapore's former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew speaking in 1990.

Dr Garry Rodan is with the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University in Perth. He explains how Singapore's media laws were changed to constrain reporting by the international press.

DR RODAN: There had been some concern that in publications like the Far Eastern Economic Review, Asiaweek and the other predominant regional publications had been overly sympathetic to J.B. Jeyaretnam and the opposition more generally. Certainly that they were giving them more of a hearing than the domestic media. And a fairly major reform took place or a couple of reforms in the late 1980s to the Newspaper and Printing Presses Act, the most important of which introduced a clause which opened up the possibility of circulation cuts, de facto bannings in other words for publications that were deemed to have interfered in domestic politics, which was a deliberately vague phrase which left a lot of onus on the part of editors and journalists as to exactly what that meant. And in a climate of quite dramatic circulation cuts for those that had been deemed to have violated this particular clause understandably editors and journalists erred on the side of caution.

In conjunction with these sorts of actions taken against what were perceived as transgressors in the media. We also had and continue to have quite expensive litigation taken out by the government and by the authorities against journalists or individuals quoted in publications on the grounds of defamation and liable. So very very litigous atmosphere and the strategy was clearly aimed to hurt the hip pocket and to put it I suppose mildly dramatically international editors were brought to their knees through this mechanism of financially penalising their organisations.

MARES: Garry Rodan.