In the past couple of weeks, the internet has been choked with news on an advertising campaign for E-Pay and the subsequent rap video response by siblings Preeti (better known as Preetipls) and Subhas Nair.

The entire affair was pretty much a textbook example of the Streisand effect—the police report and government decree to gag the video introduced its contents to a larger, mainstream Singaporean audience. Many netizens were set off by the line “Chinese people always out here f*cking it up.” Singaporeans with different viewpoints went up in arms, and local comment threads were set ablaze. Some demanded for the Nair siblings be imprisoned. Others called for accountability from the makers of the original E-Pay ad for their casual dehumanisation of Indian people.

The ensuing fiasco encircled the E-Pay ad and, to a larger degree, the Nair siblings. But amidst all the chaos, a local news channel silenced the true victims of the incident.

At the time of the rap video’s release, CNA had already filmed and produced a television documentary, entitled “Roar!”, which was set to premiere on 3 August. The documentary follows the journeys of several musicians—Benjamin Kheng, Aisyah Aziz, Wan Weiliang, Subhas, and Migrants Band Singapore—as they craft songs for this year’s National Day. Subhas and Migrants Band Singapore collaborated on the alternative rap track “Utopia”, and meant for the song to be a subversive critique of wealth inequality in Singapore—an issue naturally close to the hearts of the music ensemble.

Why? Because Migrants Band Singapore is a vibrant music group formed by migrant construction workers in Singapore. When they’re not performing backbreaking manual labour under the sun, they dedicate their time to creating music and showcasing Bangladeshi culture. The band members make a living by laying the (literal) foundations for Singaporean society, and this is, evidently, an occupation that offers no luxuries. Our city-state ensures our rapid development at the expense of these workers’ basic freedoms. And with just a few days till the premiere of “Roar!”, CNA cut footage of the band out of the documentary. In addition, they wiped any mention of the musical collaboration between Subhas and the band from their website.

This was a knee-jerk reaction on the part of the news channel. The erasure happened almost immediately after other mainstream news outlets published articles on the police investigation against the Nair siblings. To explain the removal of Subhas and Migrants Band Singapore from the documentary, CNA stated that, regarding the rap video, it “strongly objects to all such offensive content which threatens racial harmony and will not associate with individuals who intentionally create such content. As a result, CNA has removed Mr Nair from its upcoming musical documentary ROAR and taken down the articles related to his involvement in this programme.”

It is truly ironic that, in their desperation to publicise their support for racial harmony, they revealed the opposite through their apathy toward migrant construction workers.

Migrants Band Singapore appears exactly zero times in CNA’s statement. The game-changing musical collaboration was written off as Subhas’ project and his project only. This was despite the news channel’s in-depth understanding of the song’s importance. After all, the news channel followed the musicians closely in their creative process to film the documentary, and the now-deleted article on the project was titled “Singapore rapper collaborates with migrant workers for a different kind of National Day song.”

Once again, migrant workers had no say in their treatment. Their heavy involvement in the musical project “Utopia” has disappeared completely from mainstream media outlets. Singaporean netizens were only alerted to the disappearance because vocal acquaintances of Subhas recalled the content of the deleted article and checked the article’s now-defunct URL.