Earlier today I was at the Future Of Singapore‘s event ‘Post-PE 2017 Singapore Moving Forward’ where Dr Tan Cheng Bock was the key speaker.
Dr Tan made several observations today – one of them was that large numbers of people were moving away from mainstream media to alternative media for their news consumption.
Dr Tan’s observation on new media stirred some memories in me. I remembered that in 2011, when I was the chief editor of The Online Citizen SG and had asked him for an interview for the publication. After several enquiries, Dr Tan invited my team and I to his house for the interview.
At the interview he said that he had not heard of the publication and asked who our readers were, and if they comprised of people like taxi-drivers and factory workers. He also wanted to know what were our distribution points.
I explained to him how the new media worked, and he readily admitted that he was unfamiliar about how the alternative media worked. Nevertheless, he granted us the interview.
Soon after that interview, the publication I was leading at that time decided to arrange for a Forum with all the 2011 Presidential candidates – Dr Tan, Dr Tony Tan, Mr Tan Kin Lian and Mr Tan Jee Say – and sent out invitations to all of them.
We had expected that Jee Say would be the first to accept our invitation as he had been a guest at another TOC event prior and was familiar with how the platform worked.
To our surprise, Dr Tony Tan was the first to accept our request. Media experts like Cherian George were pleasantly surprised at that time about how the ‘PAP-sanctioned’ candidate, Dr Tony Tan, was engaging the new media. Some even hailed it as a new era for government relationship with alternative media. How that eventually turned out is another story for another time.
But anyway, Dr Tan Cheng Bock was the last candidate to accept our invitation to the Forum. He probably did not realise or understand the kind of reach that we had. As it turned out, it was perhaps the most spoken about forum of that kind.
Almost 7 years later, Dr Tan has made an almost 180 degrees turn on his views about the alternative media. And that is indeed commendable.
It is little wonder why he was the head of the Government’s Feedback Unit for such a long time.
I am happy to have the friendship of a wonderful human being like Dr Tan Cheng Bock and believe that he has much, much more to give back to Singapore.
Source; FB post by Ravi Philemon