The Straits Times has come under fire for allegedly publishing errors or misleading statements in three separate articles within one week.
The first article was about how a woman’s skirt was caught on an escalator at Bugis Junction, prompting passers-by to shatter the escalator glass to free the woman. The Straits Times article, however, seemed to suggest that the glass shattered when the woman who was caught pulled her dress forcefully.
In the article, which was originally titled “Woman’s skirt gets caught in Bugis Junction escalator; glass portion of railing shatters” included the following remark:
At least one netizen disputed the publication’s version of events:
The Straits Times subsequently edited the headline of the article to “Escalator glass panel shattered by passers-by attempting to free woman who got stuck at Bugis Junction” and also appears to have edited the remark on how the woman shattered the glass by yanking on her dress out of the article.
The URL of the article still reflects the original headline of “Woman’s skirt gets caught in Bugis Junction escalator; glass portion of railing shatters” though:
In another instance, netizens called The Straits Times out for reporting that there was an alleged hostage situation at Ho Ching road, only for the police to later confirm that it was a case of criminal intimidation, not a hostage situation:
The Straits Times later acknowledged that it was “official sources” that had led them to believe it was a hostage situation and said: “Official sources had earlier said it was a possible hostage situation, but the police clarified that this was not so.”
This has, however, not stopped netizens from circulating screenshots of the paper’s original headline pointing to a hostage situation along with screenshots of the police clarification, on social media and messaging applications like WhatsApp.
The third incident has to do with a forum letter that was published in the newspaper. In an article entitled “Service providers guilty of resisting cashless drive, too”, the writer made the allegation that one such service provider who appears to resist the national cashless drive is SP services, claiming that the service provider only allows DBS credit card-holders to make “recurring bill payments” and noting that only DBS customers were allowed to make online payments for years:
OCBC card-holders promptly disputed this statement:
