Last month the press watchdog, Reporters without Borders, ranked Singapore as 133rd out of 175 countries in its annual press freedom index.That prompted Singapore's law minister, K Shanmugam, to dismiss the listing as "quite absurd and divorced from reality", insisting to a group of visiting American lawyers that Singapore is not "a repressive state" and does not "unfairly target the press".
He added: "Our approach on press reporting is simple: the press can criticise us, our policies. We do not seek to condemn that."
The hypocrisy of that statement was exposed a day later when freelance reporter Ben Bland became the latest journalist to be barred from working in Singapore.
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