S'pore TV station apologizes after report on Philippines
S'pore TV station apologizes after report on Philippines
SINGAPORE (AP): A Singapore TV station on Thursday apologized after outraging the city-state's Filipino community with an earlier report saying it was "good news" that neither of two headless bodies found in the Philippines was that of an American.
The offending report on Wednesday evening was "insensitive," Straits Times TV anchor Michelle Quah said during the station's Thursday evening news program.
"We would like to apologize for having hurt the feelings of Filipinos," Quah said.
In a Wednesday night report about two bodies found on the Philippine island of Basilan, where separatist guerrillas are holding Filipino and American hostages, Quah had said that "the good news is that neither (body) belonged to American hostage Guillermo Sobero."
Diplomats at the Philippines' Embassy in Singapore held a "closed-door meeting" early Thursday about the matter, said Edwin De Pacina, assistant to the head of the embassy's political and economic section. He declined to give further details.
Gigi Tan, a Filipino marketing manager living in Singapore, said she was "really outraged" by the report. "The reporter should have just stuck to the facts," Tan said. "Nobody has the right to judge who should live or not."
Filipinos living in Singapore began calling the station to complain after the broadcast aired late Wednesday, Straits Times TV news editor Jennifer Lewis said.
Lewis said the wording of the earlier report was "a stupid mistake" and was "not intentional at all."
Sobero, of Corona, California, was among more than two dozen hostages captured in raids over the past 2.5 weeks and held by Abu Sayyaf, a group of radical Muslims demanding an independent state in the southern Philippines.
Abu Sayyaf claimed it executed Sobero, one of three American hostages held by the group, on Tuesday. The Philippine military said it is unable to verify the claim and that Sobero may still be alive.
About 110,000 Filipinos live in Singapore, a wealthy city- state of 4 million people, most of them ethnic Chinese. The majority of the Filipinos living in Singapore work as maids.
Tempers flared between Singapore and the Philippines in 1995 when Singapore authorities hanged Filipino maid Flor Contemplacion for murder despite appeals from the Philippine government.
Anti-Singapore protests broke out in the Philippines, and the two countries temporarily withdrew their respective ambassadors. Relations were normalized in 1996.
Straits Times TV, owned by Singapore's government-linked media firm Singapore Press Holdings or SPH, is a new station that started broadcasting last month.
SPH is best known as the publisher of The Straits Times newspaper, Singapore's main English-language daily.