Singapore

Singapore is a parliamentary republic of roughly 6.1 million people governed by the People’s Action Party without interruption since 1959. At the general election of 3 May 2025, the first under Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, the PAP took 87 of 97 elected seats and 65.57 per cent of votes cast in contested constituencies, up from 61.24 per cent in 2020, on a turnout of 92.83 per cent. The Workers’ Party retained all ten of its elected seats and subsequently took up the two available non-constituency seats, making the PAP and WP the only political parties represented among MPs in the 15th Parliament. On 4 December 2025 the High Court dismissed Workers’ Party leader Pritam Singh’s appeal and upheld his convictions for lying to a parliamentary committee. Following a parliamentary resolution on 14 January 2026, the Prime Minister terminated his designation as Leader of the Opposition the next day. The party declined to nominate another elected MP, and the office has remained vacant since.

RSF ranks Singapore 123rd of 180 in 2026 with a score of 44.57, unchanged in position from 2025 but down from 45.78, with the legal indicator weakest at 164th and the social indicator falling from 125th to 137th. RSF groups Singapore with Indonesia and Thailand as jurisdictions where political and business interests exploit a legal system that does not sufficiently protect the press, and describes the country’s major traditional media as concentrated in Mediacorp and SPH Media. The regulatory environment combines licensing and content rules with a broad set of statutory mechanisms governing online publication. The Broadcasting Act 1994 and IMDA content codes govern licensed services, while the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act 2019, the Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act 2021 and the Online Criminal Harms Act 2023 provide different forms of direction-making power over specified online content and activity; contempt and defamation law add further constraints on publication. An Online Safety Commission began operating on 29 June 2026 under the Online Safety (Relief and Accountability) Act 2025; its first phase covers five categories of harm, none concerning news.

State Media Monitor maps two organisations, both Captured Public/State-Managed (CaPu), and neither has changed classification during the 2022–2026 window. Between them they dominate Singapore’s mainstream national news market. Mediacorp is the sole free-to-air television broadcaster, wholly owned by the state investment company Temasek Holdings, and the government had allocated about S$380 million annually to it over the preceding five financial years. SPH Media Trust publishes the national newspaper titles in all four official languages and is not state-owned: it is a company limited by guarantee whose newspaper operating company remains subject to the Newspaper and Printing Presses Act, under which management shares require ministerial approval and outweigh ordinary shares two hundred to one on appointments and dismissals. It received S$260.6 million in FY2024 under a five-year package of up to S$900 million expiring in 2027.

The country’s distinguishing feature is that state influence over media governance operates through two different institutional mechanisms, while government policy increasingly places the two organisations in a common category. Ministers now describe both Mediacorp and SPH Media as Singapore’s public service media entities. Neither has a statutory guarantee of institutional editorial independence or an arm’s-length public funding authority. In both cases the share of total income accounted for by state funding cannot be established from the freely available public disclosures reviewed by State Media Monitor. Predominant state funding is therefore not demonstrated, which is the condition that keeps both organisations outside the State-Controlled category.

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