Mediacorp is a media conglomerate that serves as Singapore’s national public broadcaster. Its history harks back to 1936 when British Malaya Broadcasting Corporation was formed, receiving from the British crown a license to operate a radio network.
Today, the company runs six television stations, 11 radio channels and five news portals. By assets, Mediacorp is the largest media company in Singapore.
Media assets
Television: Suria, Channel 5 , Channel U, Channel 8, Vasantham, CNA
Radio: Ria, Gold, Symphony, YES, CNA938, Warna, Class, Capital, Oli, Love, 987
News portals: 8Days, Today, 8World, Berita, Seithi
State Media Matrix Typology: Captured Public/State-Managed (CaPu)
Ownership and governance
Mediacorp is fully owned by Temasek Holdings, an investment company controlled by the Government of Singapore. Temasek has investments in a range of industries, controlling DBS Bank, Singapore Airlines, engineering firms and numerous investment vehicles. As a full owner, Temasek Holdings appoints the nine members of the Board of Directors that oversees the management of Mediacorp. Current members of the board have positions in other state-run companies (i.e. Maritime and Port Authority) or have positions in the state administration.
Source of funding and budget
Mediacorp is funded through a combination of state funding (grants from the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), a statutory body of the Singapore government subordinated to the Ministry of Communications and Information (MCI), and subsidies from other ministries and state agencies) and advertising revenue. Mediacorp has not published detailed financial reports in the past several years.
According to local analysts in Singapore, Mediacorp’s revenues from commercials accounted for some 40% of Mediacorp’s total income in 2019. Between 2015 and 2020, the government spent S$ 310m (US$ 228m) a year in grants awarded to Mediacorp to produce public service programming.
However, in recent years, the company has beefed up the share of commercial sales in its overall income as the government subsidy also decreased.
In 2021, in a move to boost its ad revenues, Mediacorp launched Mediacorp AdDirect, a self-service advertising platform that is aimed at offering businesses of all sizes the opportunity to reach their target audience. The platform enables advertisers to create their own campaigns and to follow their performance on the various platforms owned by Mediacorp.
The government allocation to produce public service broadcasting programs went down to S$ 170m (US$ 119m) in 2022, according to data from the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA), the country’s media regulator.
Editorial independence
In spite of claims by Mediacorp’s management that its outlets have editorial independence, local experts and journalists claim that the company has a very restrictive editorial policy that all journalists in the company have to abide by. Journalists who have inside sources at Mediacorp say that reports are routinely censored by a team of people employed to do precisely (and only) this job, claims that were confirmed by employees who left the company.
No domestic statute establishing the independence of the media outlets run by Mediacorp has been identified during the latest round of research.
No domestic statute and no independent assessment mechanism that would validate the independence of the media outlets run by Mediacorp have been identified.
October 2023