Actress Joanne Peh didn’t know much about Russia's invasion of Ukraine

When the dinner table conversation turned to the war in Ukraine, Joanne Peh had not followed the news about it.

“I seemed to have heard that Ukraine was at war, but I did not pay attention to the specific reasons,” the Mediacorp actress was quoted as writing. “In this era of information overload, I can still be cut off from the rest of the world.”

That was in a column she wrote in Lianhe Zaobao on Friday (March 4).

And the Chinese newspaper’s readers reacted, 8 Days reported.

The magazine quoted one of them as saying this was “disappointing” coming from “a well-known artiste and university graduate”.

The 38-year-old holds a degree in mass communications from the Nanyang Technological University.

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8 Days also carried her response in Lianhe Zaobao.

“At that time, the Russia-Ukraine war had just broken out when my friends talked about it,” it quoted her as saying. “I usually don’t pay much attention to international and political news as I focus more on the subject of children’s educational psychology.”

Peh has two children with her husband, the actor Qi Yuwu, and is involved with early childhood education.

She was trying to make the point that as international news was not something she frequently clicked on, it did not immediately appear in her social media feeds.

“This experience serves as a warning to myself and also got me thinking, how do we know if everything we see is the truth? If a lot of people are talking about something, does it make it true?”

Well Joanne, may we humbly suggest that in addition to writing for a newspaper, you read one too perhaps?

Sure, newspapers get things wrong sometimes, and they may have their biases too, but you should remember from your NTU days that at least they make an attempt to check the facts.

And fact-checked information, published as quickly as possible, is something you could do with now, when two countries, however far away, are locked in such consequential combat.