On Sunday, April 15, The Online Citizen (TOC) published an article, "Football match abandoned because of PAP MP Lee Bee Wah?".

TOC said "based on information which has been corroborated", the floodlights were switched off at 9pm by the "Centre Manager for the Yishun Stadium", who had "allegedly" received instructions from Nee Soon GRC MP Lee Bee Wah "as a result of complaints from residents from nearby condominium The Estuary".

TOC said it reached out to Lee for her comment.

Lee Bee Wah makes post on Facebook

A day later, April 16, Lee updated her Facebook page with a status saying she "gave no such" instruction to have the stadium lights switched off.

She also shared a screenshot of the Warriors Football Club status update on April 10 that said the floodlights had failed.

Lee said that despite this post, TOC "went ahead to post a falsehood".

A check on the Warriors Football Club page shows that the update was indeed posted on April 10, and was edited once, calling the match "suspended" instead of "abandoned" due to floodlight "failure" instead of "issue":

Competing sources of information: Who to believe?

On TOC's Facebook post of the article itself, there were individuals refuting TOC's source's account of what happened:

In the comment thread, TOC asked one Danny Ngiam, who it alleged is a "Nee Soon GRC PAP grassroots", to get Lee to clarify the matter.

The TOC post had over 400 shares with majority of comments directing anger at Lee.

Could all this have been prevented if Lee had clarified directly with TOC earlier?

Technical error

After the TOC article was published, Warriors Football Club general manager Paul Poh clarified on TOC's Facebook post that the stadium lights were programmed to shut down at 9pm and that it was a mistake to schedule the match at the stadium:

Facts change according to time

One thing this incident has shown so far is that something as simple as how the stadium floodlights got turned off cannot even be answered accurately in a timely manner or in real time.

There are several competing versions of what happened at this point:

• TOC said Lee Bee Wah instructed the floodlights to be turned off. TOC said this was corroborated by someone working in the stadium.

• Lee Bee Wah said she did not give instructions for the floodlights to be turned off.

• The floodlights went off due to floodlight failure, according to Warriors Football Club Facebook update.

• ActiveSG has said the Yishun stadium staff should have allowed the lights to be kept on for a while longer, as it said training sessions and matches typically end at 9pm.

• Warriors Football Club manager said two lights facing The Estuary condominium are turned off automatically at 9pm due to complaints from residents.

Not TOC's first time not receiving clarification

However, this is not the first time TOC ran a story without incorporating official sources of information.

In 2016, TOC was chastised by Law and Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam for spreading falsehoods in a “planned, orchestrated campaign” against the Singapore Police Force with regards to the Benjamin Lim case.

Shanmugam added that the “overall narrative and impression conveyed by the TOC articles” are that the i) police were lying; ii) police intimidated Lim; and iii) police pressured Lim to confess to a crime that he did not commit.

TOC had said that it wrote articles based on accounts given by Lim's parents.

TOC told Mothership.sg it had written four emails to the authorities to clarify the case then but received no response.

Subsequently, TOC said its reports on the case “were not fully accurate”, “given the dearth of information available” to them.

In response to a point raised in Parliament by East Coast GRC MP Jessica Tan on a dearth of information, Shanmugam said that all forms of media must observe the legal principle of contempt in the Benjamin Lim case.

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TOC will operate with or without clarification

In this instance, TOC proceeded with the story regardless of the details.

It is a form of iterative reporting where the story changes with the times and dependent on new known or unknown sources to come forward with information as the story progresses.

This is an effective strategy for TOC to adopt as a small outfit operating within resource constraints.

However, it runs the risk of running afoul of the law if it eventually gets a factual error fatally wrong. Unless, of course, gets the clarification they ask for in a timely fashion and reports on them factually.