Amidst all the salty troubles between former The Sunday Times columnist Dr. Lee Wei Ling and Singapore Press Holdings (SPH), her ex-editor has spilled the beans on why they weren’t willing to publish her story.
You might recall that on the day after the first death anniversary of her father — Lee Kuan Yew — she published a lengthy essay on her Facebook page about how the pragmatic founding prime minister would have cringed at all the veneration. ‘Twas strange of course — usually her passages would appear as columns on The Sunday Times.
A couple of days after that, she announced that she no longer wished to write for SPH anymore as they did not allow her to practice ‘freedom of speech’. She further alleged that her columns had been edited to leave out certain issues, that the editors were too “timid to disobey, and too embarrassed by their timidness to tell me the truth”.
Of course, folks initially concluded that SPH had commanded their editors not to publish Dr. Lee’s disapproval of “hero-worshipping” her father — allegedly censored because The Straits Times were running the very same “hero-worshipping” articles that whole week.
This was not the case, wrote Ivan Fernandez, the editor who worked on Dr. Lee’s columns.
Setting the record straight on her allegations, he detailed the process of editing that particular column. Apparently, Dr. Lee and Fernandez had already confirmed a version of the column to be published on March 27. Two days before that however, he received another version of the column with “distracting” substantial additions. That was, however, a minor issue compared to another glaring one — plagiarism.
“But there was another issue as well,” Fernandez wrote in his op-ed. “Upon checking the accuracy of a quote she cited from British Prime Minister David Cameron, and other further checks, I found that almost three quarters of the additions had been plagiarised.”
He found that her segment on Mao Zedong’s death had parts lifted from an obscure website called chineseposters.net, while another bit about Winston Churchill’s death was taken from The Guardian.
Savage.
Fernandez however noted that despite the plagiarism, Dr Lee was “adamant” that The Sunday Times run the latest version of her article with no further edits.
“I am going to blog this version or a similar version of this. If there are copyright issues, then I won’t sell my copy right to SPH,” she wrote in an e-mail to her former editor. “I thought long and hard about it. I want the version I decide on. I hv my reason for my decision. It does not matter to me whether u agree with me or otherwise.”
That was when she went ahead and posted her now infamous post on Facebook.
.Lee Kuan Yew would have cringed at the hero worship just one year after his deathThe response of Singaporeans during…
Posted by Lee Wei Ling on Tuesday, 5 April 2016
Fernandez noted that it was unambiguously clear that he could not run her article on The Sunday Times, considering the plagiarism and their policy that they don’t publish anything that has already been published online.
“The relationship between contributors, editors and publishers is one that is based on trust,” Fernandez wrote. “That is broken when ultimatums are issued; no newspaper editor would accept columns on that basis, however illustrious the writers.”
Dr. Lee hasn’t responded yet — but we’ll be waiting to see what she has to say next.
