Alibaba buys HK paper to ‘reshape’ it
‘WANTS END TO NEGATIVE CHINA COVERAGE’
HONG KONG: Alibaba Group, the Chinese internet giant, 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.
As the backbone of this effort, Alibaba agreed on Friday to buy the media assets of SCMP Group, including one of Hong Kong’s most influential English-language daily newspapers, the South China Morning Post. Alibaba is acquiring an award-winning newspaper that for decades reported aggressively on subjects that China’s staterun media outlets are forbidden to cover, such as political scandals and humanrights cases.
Alibaba said the deal was fuelled by a desire to improve China’s image and offer an alternative to what it calls the biased lens of Western news outlets. While Alibaba said the Chinese government had no role in its deal to buy the Hong Kong newspaper, the company’s position aligns closely with that of the Communist Party, which has grown increasingly critical of the way Western news organisations cover China.
This coverage, the company said, influences how investors and others outside China regard Alibaba. The company said its shares, which are listed in New York, were being affected by all the negative reports about China.
“Our business is so rooted in China, and touches so many aspects of the Chinese economy, that when people don’t really understand China and have the wrong perception of China, they also have a lot of misconceptions about Alibaba,” Joseph C Tsai, Alibaba’s executive vice-chairman, said in an interview.
“What’s good for China is also good for Alibaba,” Mr Tsai added. He echoed a phrase often attributed to the former head of General Motors: What’s good for GM is good for the US.
For Alibaba, the financial stakes are not significant. Estimated to be worth US$100 million (about 3.6 billion baht), the deal represents a relatively small amount for a company with more than $12 billion in annual revenue.
The bigger risk is reputational, as Alibaba leaps into the realm of politics. In owning the South China Morning Post, Alibaba will control a news organisation that operates along a border that separates two systems, one in Hong Kong with a relatively free press and another in mainland China with strict censorship controls.
As speculation of a deal began in recent weeks, some critics in Hong Kong had already started to worry about whether Alibaba was seeking to tame the paper’s coverage in order to curry favour with the Chinese leadership.
The newspaper, which is not subject to China’s strict censorship rules, has long jumped into controversial issues on the mainland such as covering the anniversary of the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square and last year’s Occupy Central movement in Hong Kong.
The newspaper has delved into scandals among China’s elite, including Ling Jihua, who served as an aide to the former Chinese president Hu Jintao.
Willy Lam, a political commentator and former editor at the South China Morning Post, said an Alibaba takeover would most likely exacerbate a trend at the paper toward self-censorship on sensitive political issues.
Alibaba, however, said it had no intention of interfering with the day-to-day operations of the paper and would not censor articles. The company said it would ensure the paper’s journalistic independence and integrity.
“We’ll operate on principles,” said Mr Tsai. “We’ll let the editors make their judgment on what to publish and not to publish. I can’t think of anything being off-limits.”
But Mr Tsai did not offer details about how Alibaba would execute its vision for more positive coverage on China without sacrificing editorial independence, two agendas that are seemingly at odds. He said that more “fair and accurate” articles would translate, over time, into a more positive image of the country.
With a print circulation of 100,000, the South China Morning Post is relatively small. But the newspaper, which is 112 years old, has outsize influence in the West because of its proximity to China and its English language format.