Last night we had Zoom cocktails — by which we mean the guzzling of Old Forester poured over one of those giant hipster ice cubes — with Tim Blair, columnist for News Corp Australia’s Daily Telegraph. Unlike the non-Murdoch media in the United States and, we expect, Oz as well, Tim and the Telegraph have been rather clear and, we dare say, scientific in their description of the origins of the Wuhan virus. That has earned them a couple of badges of honor unbelievably arrogant letters of demerit from the People’s Republic of China. Tim delicately deconstructed the Commie “pansygrams” here and here, both links worth your time.
That, however is not the best part. Here is the best part:
You want some “fearless” journalism? Not a bad example, right there. We’d love to see more of that in the corporate press, but much of it is entangled with conglomerates that want to sell products in China. AT&T owns CNN, Disney owns ABC, and so forth, and even The New York Times has to be worried about its employees. Is there any of them that aren’t compromised?
Probably not.
If you were to imagine that all of this were just Middle Kingdom indignation at “sweet and sour sick” and the like, you’d be, well, sadly misinformed. Before defending China became a totem of the anti-Trump tribe and most Westerners had heard of “wet markets,” China had launched a plan to dominate global media.
Beijing is buying up media outlets and training scores of foreign journalists to ‘tell China’s story well’ – as part of a worldwide propaganda campaign of astonishing scope and ambition…
[O]ver the past decade or so, China has rolled out a more sophisticated and assertive strategy, which is increasingly aimed at international audiences. China is trying to reshape the global information environment with massive infusions of money – funding paid-for advertorials, sponsored journalistic coverage and heavily massaged positive messages from boosters. While within China the press is increasingly tightly controlled, abroad Beijing has sought to exploit the vulnerabilities of the free press to its advantage.
In its simplest form, this involves paying for Chinese propaganda supplements to appear in dozens of respected international publications such as the Washington Post. The strategy can also take more insidious forms, such as planting content from the state-run radio station, China Radio International (CRI), on to the airwaves of ostensibly independent broadcasters across the world, from Australia to Turkey….
Since 2003, when revisions were made to an official document outlining the political goals of the People’s Liberation Army, so-called “media warfare” has been an explicit part of Beijing’s military strategy. The aim is to influence public opinion overseas in order to nudge foreign governments into making policies favourable towards China’s Communist party.
The Guardian, more than a year ago. Read the whole thing. Oh, and bold emphasis added.
Somebody ought make a list of the American media outlets that have published paid PRC propaganda. Oh. Wait. They did.
Media corporations, left and right, really won’t be credible on the Covid-19 pandemic until they publish detailed disclosures of their financial and other entanglements with the People’s Republic. Otherwise, how do we know they aren’t Commie shills?
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