Singapore's Newspapers' Portrayal of Gay Sex Law
Section 377A (s377A) was a Singapore law that criminalised oral and anal sex between consenting male adults, making it punishable with imprisonment of up to two years. It originated from the UK and was adopted in Singapore during its British colonial rule. During the Penal Code Review on 23rd October 2007, s377A was voted by the Parliament of Singapore to be retained in the legislation. In the years leading up to its official repeal on 3rd January 2023, s377A was challenged in court five times. And being a contentious issue in Singapore, its discourse garnered extensive media coverage, yet little is known about how the media portrayed the issue. As such, we seek to investigate the media’s portrayal of the s377A discourse, spanning 15 years from the initial Penal Code Review in 2007 to its eventual repeal in 2023. Adopting framing theory, our study thematically analyses how media stories of s377A have evolved, examining how the media shapes us to think about the issue. We reviewed the coverage of The Straits Times (ST) and TODAY (TY), as they had high readership and extensive circulation which reflects the broader news landscape in Singapore.
Newspaper articles were sampled by searching ‘377A’ on Lexus-Nexus and a total of 808 articles from ST and TY were derived after removing identical duplicates. To identify key themes in discussions on s377A within these articles, an investigation of the Parliamentary Reports of the Penal Code Review in 2007 was undertaken by both authors and the following themes emerged: Medical, Legal, Societal-Morality, and Religion. For large datasets, it is not uncommon to rely on auto-coding function in Nvivo, and as such, we started building the algorithm by going through 2 rounds with the pattern coding function of Nvivo to build the algorithm. In both rounds, we went through the same process – setting it to the average quantity function in order to generate references, coded via sentences, and came to an agreement on the references in the algorithm. We ensured that we exhaustively coded a minimum of 10 contextually relevant sentences under each keyword. Thereafter, the last round of pattern coding we set it to give the maximum number of references. This resulted in a total of 17,119 references coded into the 4 themes.
We found that the s377A issue was featured most frequently in 2022, with peaks also found in 2007, 2009, 2013 and 2018. In terms of thematic salience across the years, we found that Legal led the way with 5637 references, followed by Societal-Morality (5523), Religion (4660) and Medical (1299). We also compared how the themes were featured between ST and TY over the years, and found that both newspapers showed similar trends. However, we found a larger gap in ST’s feature of the Medical theme (compared to other themes within ST) and as compared to TY’s. TY was also found to be relatively more erratic (large fluctuations) in the portrayal of themes over the years compared to ST. Our study will explain the findings.
