Temasek Review Reviewed

Temasek Review aka Dr Joseph Ong Chor Teck is finally being pushed with his back to the wall. The New Paper is going all out to expose his identity. On some levels I sympathise with him as I am also an anonymous blogger who wants to separate my online life from my real life. But on many levels, I think Dr Ong just has to face the consequences for his actions. Take a look at Unbranded Bread and Butter’s list of who Dr Ong has offended in the past in his many online incarnations.

The irony or justice if you want to call that way is that Dr Ong or TR is being undone by his very own techniques of smears and insinuations. Dr Ong or TR has an army of witnesses and informants and when New Paper dug up its own sources about TR, TR whined like a sore loser. Dr Ong runs a tabloid blog which started off as the Wayang Party. Then it was vehemently anti-WP and vociferously anti-TOC. He later repackaged it as Temasek Review and by that time the blog became ant-PAP, complete with sensationalist stories of leaks, whistle-blowers and other unverified allegations on the rot within the PAP and its government. Some might have been true, some might have been made up. TR had attacked the mainstream media for its pro-PAP bias but the careful reader, and hopefully there are many out there, would know that Dr Ong was at the other end of the spectrum. His own media had a clear anti-PAP bias instead. Now, the tabloid arm of the PAP media is taking him down in this Internet tabloid vs the newspaper tabloid contest. As the saying goes, what goes around, comes around and we should sit back and watch the fallout as a warm up to the smear campaigns when the GE comes.

While the TR vs TNP contest is entertaining, the revelation that TR is actually run by a medical doctor and not some uneducated person is interesting. Here is this educated professional who not only deliberately indulged in biased sensationalistic journalism probably to boost readership to his website, he also dabbled in plagiarism.

Dr Ong and his TR was accused of blatant plagiarism before but as it was a small anonymous player, the bigger fish probably didn’t bother about his academic or copyright theft. But it does show how deceitful this Dr Ong is at least in terms of his blog, which is accepting donations by the way and needs visits to drive up its ad sales as TR itself admitted. As someone who had a university education, he chose to cut and paste without attribution articles for his blog. His blogging style reminded me of Kong Hee’s plagiarism. Kong Hee had a doctorate in theology and yet "stole" intellectual property to give false impression of his biblical knowledge to his flock, while making money out of it at the same time. Many thought what he did was unacceptable except for the hardcore Kong Hee supporters. So did Dr Ong from TR commit the same shameful cut and paste con? The objective reader would know the answer.