Everything Also Complain

A FORMER reporter with The Straits Times is being investigated by the police over an allegation of underage sex. Mr Eisen Teo, 28, who was on the Schools team, had his services terminated by Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) on Jan 18. This followed an internal investigation.

An SPH spokesman said yesterday: “As the police investigation is still ongoing, we are unable to provide further details at this point in time.” Mr Teo was called in for questioning by the police in late December.

It is understood that he has not been charged. A Singapore Press Holdings local scholar, he joined the paper in 2009 and was part of the Schools team, which produces two magazines for schools – Little Red Dot for primary pupils, and IN for secondary students. It also conducts activities for students in its media club.

He was well regarded by colleagues and news of the police probe shocked the newsroom.

A popular Twitter user, Eisen describes himself on his profile as ‘a journalist, historian, DREAMBLOWER, rebel and lover’ to his over 1300 followers. His ‘About me’ introduction (deleted) includes a poetic abstract from what seems to be an erotic novella. An Honours student in History from NUS, he broke into news reporting in 2009 advocating Twitter as the ‘darling of new media exponents’. Earlier in 2008, he was a commentator in a piece about JC life being ‘a jungle of tribes’. Turns out he was from RJC too, according to the article ‘Growing up in Tribes’ (Dec 3 2008, ST)

While no former schoolmate has ever laid a finger on me, I was not spared the emotional roller coaster of group inclusion and exclusion at Raffles Junior College (RJC). I put my bitter-sweet experience down to the fact that I was not from its affiliated school, Raffles Institution (RI).

Undercover investigative journalism was part of the job as well. In 2010, he wrote about teens getting Fake IDs to get them access into clubs, cigarettes and alcohol. His article, titled ‘Time to get touch on fake-ID users’, started with the sentence: ‘Last month, I followed two 16 year olds on a VICE SPREE’. He continued to focus on youth issues, whether it’s about condom giveaways or skateboarding in Tampines (a Nov 2012 piece which could also very well be his last).

Eisen hasn’t been charged for the offence, so why this sudden firing during a pending police investigation?  Does SPH have a standard procedure for dealing with staff who get involved in public scandals, or are the inconsistencies in disciplinary action something to do with the nature of the alleged offence? In 2010, Senior Vice President Peter Khoo was sacked, but only after admitting to misappropriating funds, and eventually charged for corruption. Last year, STOMP content producer Samantha Francis was terminated by SPH for posting fake images of an MRT door remaining open while in motion. Just before the Punggol by-election, a former clerk for ST Classified Ads was arrested for sending death threats to Reform Party’s Kenneth Jeyaretnam. This guy was not even named. In the meantime, there’s another police investigation going on over a published ST snap poll prior to the by-election. No mention of people getting sacked here. In fact one of the reporters behind the original poll results went on to write an article about the poll being investigated.

Rarely is a journalist taken out because of what he actually writes. In 2006, Today suspended a contributor’s column for ‘distorting the truth’ about high costs of living. The offending article was titled ‘Singaporeans are fed, up with progress’, which suggested that the announcement of price increases were timed deliberately after the elections. The ‘anti-establishment’ content seems mild compared to what we read these days online, and the trend of withholding bad news only until after elections continues till this day with the White paper revelations. The columnist who got the beat down? Lee Kin Mun. Some of us know him as Mr Brown.

As for this SPH crackdown, it’s not so much Eisen doing the dream-blowing so much as his dreams being blown to bits. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the brainchild behind the ‘illegal’ ST poll to be brought to light, though.