Can republic's TV monopoly sell news to the region? 

ASIAN values, Singapore-style, are alive and well. Indeed, they're a potent force that can put Asian viewers in front of their television sets. At least, that's what Singapore's domestic television monopoly hopes.

On March 1, government-owned Television Corp of Singapore, which runs all of Singapore's domestic TV channels, launched an 18-hour all-news station called Channel NewsAsia. For now it's available only in Singapore, but the channel's managers say they intend to go regional as early as next year. And as they position themselves to try to win a wider audience, they're banking on their ability to convince viewers the station has a broadly Asian perspective that can sell beyond Singapore's tightly controlled television market.

Consider the promotional advertisements the station runs throughout the day. CNA reporters, news presenters and producers lean against models of the station's logo, gaze into the camera and tell viewers how deeply they understand and care about the region. The station's Tokyo reporter, for instance, tells how her questions about Japan and its ability to pull Asia out of crisis are "the same as yours." The message: Channel NewsAsia is different; it doesn't have the same assumptions as Western-owned networks like StarTV, CNN and CNBC. (CNBC Asia is 50 percent owned by Dow Jones, publisher of the REVIEW.) The new station, the ads suggest, understands the region's sensitivities and complexities and will get the perspective right.

Thus far, it has been a bumpy road for Television Corp, which saw two leading news presenters leave just ahead of the launch and which ran smack into an advertising war with Singapore Press Holdings, the country's newspaper monopoly. But the venture's prospects will ultimately depend on the answers to three questions: One, can a station run from Singapore convince viewers outside the city-state that it has a credible and independent voice? Two, can it deliver its promises of programming that's different from that viewers get elsewhere? And, finally, in a market where the big players are still losing money, with the exception of CNN, is there room for another cable news station?

On the first matter, the channel's managers admit they have some convincing to do. A month before CNA's launch, its director of programming, Sean Seow, told the REVIEW the channel has "a cross to bear" in convincing viewers outside Singapore that it's an unbiased voice. But he argued that its task in building a reputation for credibility and independence is no different from that of Western-owned networks like CNN and CNBC reporting in Asia. Since the launch, CNA officials have turned down several interview requests.

For an idea of what the channel is up against outside its home base, though, listen to Albert Chan, a Hong Kong-based lobbyist for the tobacco industry: "The first thing that comes to mind is, 'Oh no, not another news channel.' Look at what we've got already--CNN, BBC, CNBC, you name it, we got it. People like me already read 8-10 newspapers a day; we're overburdened with news." Chan also says there aren't enough quality journalists in Southeast Asia to put out a solid network selling an "Asian voice."

Playing to an Asian audience by pushing one's Asian origins has been tried before--most prominently by Thai entrepreneur Sondhi Limthongkul, who tried to build a pan-Asian media empire. The effort collapsed in late 1997. But hope springs eternal, probably nowhere as strongly as in Singapore. At the station's launch, Information Minister George Yeo said that Western media companies play a major role in providing news to Asians, but that it was also important to have news presented from an Asian viewpoint. He added that this "occasionally will include the Singapore viewpoint."

Singapore's leaders often speak about the increasing influence of the international press and the need for all governments to have their message cut through the noise. They are not alone: Malaysian media reports say advisers to Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad are hiring reporters to produce programmes and articles that will appear on Malaysian TV and in newspapers, countering negative reports from the non-Malaysian press.

To date, CNA has stuck to a conservative formula. Most of its daytime programming is business news--the same interviews with business people, equity analysts and wire-service market reporters that have become a staple of programming on other business news channels. Like CNBC, it has a "virtual set" that allows it to change the images appearing behind presenters. Like CNBC, the new channel updates stockmarket indexes and currency levels regularly and runs a constant stream of local stock prices on the screen during Singapore trading hours.

Many in the advertising industry worry that the formula looks too much like other channels'. "If this is a truly new station, you've got to have a big point of difference," says Sue Johns, managing director of Singapore-based MindShare, which advises advertising agencies on where to put their ads. "Why would I want to go and pull into a new channel when I've got the terrestrial channels to pull into? I don't think they've pointed out their point of difference."

Evidence of the Singapore-style Asian voice? It's there, but it's as much in what the channel doesn't report as in what it does. For example, CNA hasn't reported on local opposition politician Chee Soon Juan's civil-disobedience campaign, a story that officials at two international newswires say gets its heaviest global interest from Asian newspapers in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Malaysia.

As to whether regional markets are ready for the channel, consider that CNBC, CNN and StarTV have solid name brands, and over several years all have poured millions into the search for Asian markets. The present CNBC, in fact, was born out of a merger between two pan-Asian all-news channels which decided in 1997 that the market wasn't big enough to support both of them. The channel is still not profitable. StarTV, likewise, has yet to make a profit despite having existed for eight years.

But there's a silver lining at home. Cable TV still reaches just 17 percent of Singaporean homes, and CNA is the only news channel for the remaining 83 percent of the country. Although market-research firm ACNielsen figures the local advertising market shrank by 7 percent  last year to S$1.2 billion ($700 million), the share that comes from television ads has been rising--to 37 percent  last year from 35 percent in 1997.

With the new channel, Television Corp. can push its English-language programming into separate news and entertainment channels and sell local advertisers on the focused demographic groups those channels attract. Indeed, from a domestic perspective, this is the company's window of opportunity to build a local news channel before competition hits, says Gan Boon Guan, director of Optimum Media, another adviser to advertisers. When cable TV reaches a larger number of homes and brings all its international news channels, he says, "it will be a different ball game."