ABSTRACT
Well before the 1997-98 Asian crisis, the experiences of Singapore and Malaysia posed serious challenges for two popular ideas. The first was the notion that market development was a force for free media. The second was that new electronic media posed an unambiguous threat to authoritarian regimes. Maintaining tight media control was not without its difficulties in both cases, but the extent to which this could be reconciled with increasingly sophisticated economies was remarkable – all the more so because this included the attraction of substantial investments from the world’s leading media organisations.
