The media coverage of the disinformation campaign against His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s innocent interaction with a child shows how quick and easy it is for the media and the world to dismiss and wrong the already marginalised Tibetans. First, it exposed the fallacies of news media in the social media age—impulsive to publish the next big story on trend, compromising its responsibility of fact-checking for the ultimate ‘scoop’.
One of the earliest sources of the widely circulated video was published on 8 April by a Twitter account that is only nearly two months old. The purported online backlash was incited by shares and reposts from other accounts, Wumaos, foreign CCP beneficiaries, and Chinese state associates, grossly misinterpreted by an injudicious audience through their narrow socio-cultural perspective.
Furthermore, the official apology published by the Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama which came from his holiness’s magnanimity of spirit, has been abused to show him in a negative light.
Secondly, the media’s framing of this event reflects its inherent bias and its disregard for Tibetan voices. The coverage of the purported online backlash did not attempt to analyse the source or understand the cultural context and failed to include Tibetan perspectives from the diaspora.