Alibaba – The power of the pen

Alibaba paid $375m for South China Morning Post (SCMP) in Hong Kong.  It looks like a risky but normal commercial deal for Alibaba to want to diversify into the media industry that could compliment its complex and worldwide business empire.  According to the New York Times reporting from Hong Kong, there is a bigger agenda for Alibaba in this purchase. I quote,

‘Alibaba Group Holdings in taking over Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post (SCMP), is making an ambitious play to reshape media coverage of its home country, taking aim at what company executives call the negative portrayal of China in the Western media…the deal was fuelled by a desire to improve China’s image and offer an alternative to what it called the biased lens of Western news outlets….’

The power of the pen to shape how people think by telling stories laced with carefully crafted toxic messages has been a blatant transgression of the media industry. The Western media have two centuries of head start to mould and shape the thinking of western educated readers all over the world to think, act and behave the way they wanted them to. Many Afro Asians are now more familiar with the folk tales and history of the West than their own history and culture and subconsciously adopted a western persona without know it. They spout nonsense and hate against anything Asians and Africans without a clue as to why they are doing it and who they really are.

The Singapore’s version is the anglophiles, the western thinking bananas fed with with a diet of potatoes and hamburgers and a mind full of hate against China and anything Chinese. Thanks to the contributions of western media like the NYT, Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, Agencies, Reuters and what not. They have nothing good to say about China and would put a negative spin to everything China did and a positive spin to everything western.

The acquisition and control of SCMP is a small step taken by a commercial establishment like Alibaba to share its corporate responsibility towards its home country, to say the right thing, to give China a proper and positive image instead of all the craps and biased reports from small mind hill billies in the US and the red neck Europeans. Two centuries of planting negativities cannot disappear overnight and media like the SCMP would take at least one or two generations to cleanse the mush in the unthinking Afro Asian minds. There will be resistance, disbeliefs, denials and withdrawal symptoms to wean these unthinking minds of bananas to think straight again. Some may realize it faster than others, some may not. The good news is time is on the side of an Asian perspective as the ageing anglophiles will soon be history and not able to spout their rubbish without thinking.

What the Alibaba intends to do with SCMP is similar to what Channel News Asia is doing, presenting Asian news by Asians. Channel News Asia will lose its credibility when it slips back to using westerners to report Asian news and may even be banned by Asian countries from doing so if it is silly enough to stray away from this successful and acceptable formula.

Do not try to resist. Resistance is futile, and the truth shall set you free.