Media watches everybody, but who watches media?

By Abhijit Nag
These are exciting times for American journalism.  Jeff Bezos the Amazon man bought the Washington Post for US$250 million in August and wrote in a letter to the staff: “The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners. We will continue to follow the truth wherever it leads, and we’ll work hard not to make mistakes.”
Now Pierre Omidyar the eBay founder is about to launch an investigative journalism website with Glenn Greenwald, the reporter who  got the scoop from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about American and British domestic spying.
Something big happened in the Singapore media too. Singapore Press Holdings’ net profit attributable to shareholders shot up by $209 million and then dropped by 143.8 million. Did you notice that?
The Straits Times reported on October 12 that SPH net profit for the 2013 financial year ended August 31 fell by 25 per cent to $431 million, “mainly due to the adoption of a different accounting policy”. The report added: “With the establishment of the SPH Reit, the group changed its accounting policy for investment properties from cost to a fair-value basis.
“As a result, SPH posted a fair-value gain of $111.4 million from its investment properties for the year ended August 31, down 43.9 per cent from the year before.”
Put simply, SPH restated the account for the financial year 2012 after listing its property arm, SPH Reit, on the Singapore Exchange (SGX) mainboard.
If you check the SPH annual report for 2012, you will see the net profit attributable to shareholders was $365.5 million, 5.9 per cent lower than the previous financial year.
But using the new accounting policy, SPH restated the 2012 net profit attributable to shareholders as $574.7 million, a $209 million jump from the original figure.
Since the 2013 net profit attributable to shareholders is $431 million, it’s a 25 per cent drop from the revised 2012 figure.  Got it?
The news was reported by other local media like any other story, as if such $200 million account restatements happened every day.
SPH net profits attributable to shareholders have been restated before, but not on such a scale in recent years.
This correspondent is not questioning the figures. But while the media here reports the news, who is keeping an eye on the media? Apart from the government, that is?
There are no websites here like Romanesko and Mediagazer which cover British and American media. The government-owned MediaCorp is pretty much a closed book, answerable to no shareholders, and SPH is raking in a fortune, thank you. It’s more profitable than SIA. On $15 billion in revenue, SIA reported a net profit of $379 million in 2012-13.
SPH on the other hand reported a net profit of $431 million on an operating revenue of just $1.2 billion.
Cash cows seldom come fatter than this.