Tag: media

Chinese State Media Accidentally Releases Censorship Rules On Russia–Ukraine Coverage

A quickly-deleted social media post – released to the public apparently by accident – provides a rare glimpse of how the CCP’s messaging on the escalating Ukraine–Russia tension is channeled to the masses.

Horizon News, a video news network under state-run Beijing News, on Feb. 22 instructed staff to avoid posting any Ukraine-related content on China’s Twitter-like Weibo that may come across as unfavorable to Russia or pro-Western.

“Let me review your draft before you first put it out,” stated the Weibo post, which has since been removed. Commentaries, it added, must be “carefully selected and controlled,” while topic selections should follow the lead of People’s Daily, Xinhua, and CCTV—three of the country’s foremost Party mouthpieces.

“Whoever publishes them will be held responsible,” the post stated, noting that each post should be monitored for at least two days.

Although China is well-known for its tight restrictions on press freedom, the post provides a rare, if small, revelation into the workings of Chinese media machinery and the inner anxieties of the regime as politically fraught international developments unfold.

While deepening ties with Moscow, Beijing is also cautious to avoid blowback by being seen as directly supporting a unilateral move to seize sovereignty of another nation—given the regime’s own designs in absorbing self-ruled Taiwan.

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The Media’s Odd Double Standard On Evidence Required For Claims Of An Impending Attack

None of these claims being reported by the obedient mass media have any evidence. They’re just government assertions being passed on to the audiences of these media institutions. It’s possible that there’s real intelligence behind them, but if the public can’t see it and verify it it’s the same as there being no evidence. Secret, invisible evidence is not evidence.

And of course completely unspoken in all this straight-shooting news reporting is that the actual evidence seems to suggest that the separatist factions in Ukraine are indeed under attack with a sharp spike in aggression, as explained here by Moon of Alabama.

None of these discrepancies would be worth pointing out if the mass media in the western world did not uphold itself as a free and impartial press whose only job is to report the truth about what’s happening in the world. If the western mass media were openly owned and controlled by the United States government for the explicitly stated purpose of distributing imperial propaganda, there would be nothing odd about brazen one-sided reporting which uncritically accepts unevidenced claims by secretive government agencies with an extensive history of lies. The discrepancy is only noteworthy because it highlights another one: the discrepancy between what the western mass media purport to be, and what they actually are.

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The absurd ‘Russiagate’ Pulitzer of the NY Times and Washington Post

“For deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest,” the citation from the Pulitzer Prize board begins, “that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the president-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”

Except the journalism that the Pulitzers honored — a 2018 National Reporting prize shared by The Washington Post and The New York Times for reporting on Russiagate — did no such thing.

It led to a dramatic misunderstanding, suggesting that Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to help sway the 2016 election — a grand conspiracy we now know never existed.

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The Burden Of Proof Is Always On The Ones Making The Claim (Even If It’s About Russia)

Well you’ll be shocked to learn that, while the Ukraine invasion we’ve been told for weeks was happening any day now still has not occurred, the US and UK have declared that Russia attacked Ukraine in an invisible and unverifiable way for which the evidence is secret.

“The White House blamed Russia on Friday for this week’s cyberattacks targeting Ukraine’s defense ministry and major banks and warned of the potential for more significant disruptions in the days ahead,” AP reports. “Anne Neuberger, the Biden administration’s deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technologies, said the U.S. had rapidly linked Tuesday’s attacks to Russian military intelligence officers.”

“Technical information analysis shows the GRU was almost certainly involved in disruptive DDoS attacks,” adds a statement from the UK Foreign Office.

No evidence for this claim has been provided beyond the assertive tone with which American and British officials have uttered it, but that likely won’t stop arguments from western narrative managers that this “attack” justifies immediate economic sanctions.

You’ve probably also heard by now that President Biden announced at a press briefing that Vladimir Putin has made the decision to invade Ukraine and violently topple Kyiv “in the coming days,” citing only “intelligence”.

“What reason do you believe he’s considering that option at all?” a reporter asked Biden after his speech.

“We have a significant intelligence capability, thank you very much,” the president answered, and made his exit.

As we were reminded earlier this month in an interesting exchange between State Department spinmeister Ned Price and AP’s Matt Lee, US officials firmly believe that simply placing assertions next to the word “intelligence” should be considered rock solid proof that those assertions are true, and the press are expected to play along with this.

And indeed, a large percentage of the political/media class is responding to Biden’s unevidenced claim that Putin has decided to launch a full-scale ground invasion of Ukraine as though that invasion is actually happening.

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Media Dismiss A Literal Political Assassination Attempt Because It Doesn’t Fit Their Narrative

Quintez Brown, a 21-year-old Black Lives Matter activist, allegedly marched into the office of Louisville, Ky., mayoral candidate Craig Greenberg on Valentine’s Day and opened fire, sending a bullet through Greenberg’s clothing before fleeing the scene. Despite the story’s shock value, corporate media can’t be bothered to do much reporting on the story — and we all know exactly why.

Despite Brown’s history as a BLM activist and his flirtation with black nationalism on social media, most media outlets have shrugged off his motive for the shooting with a “who knows?” or even tried to pin it on Republicans. Brown was also a vocal gun-control advocate and was interviewed by Joy Reid on MSNBC at an anti-gun march in 2018.

The Las Vegas Sun completely whitewashed Brown’s far-left associations, asininely writing that “While there’s been no indication yet that the activist had ties to any right-wing organizations, the shooting comes amid a rise in threats against politicians fueled by increasingly violent rhetoric coming from extremist Republicans.” After backlash, the Sun tweaked the sentence to admit, “[I]t’s been reported that the activist was involved in the Black Lives Matter and gun-safety movements” — but still followed the line with the original sentence in its entirety rather than issuing a correction.

ABC simply called Brown a “social justice activist,” and after the local BLM chapter helped bail him out, David Muir vaguely referred to the group as a “community organization.”

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Western Media is Literally Peddling Neo-Nazi Propaganda to Prompt War Between Russia and Ukraine.

Western media outlets have been peddling “military training” imagery featuring 79-year-old Valentyna Konstantynovska, aka “Granny Valentyna,” amidst the consistent pro-war coverage of Ukraine and Russia. Now, it has emerged, the images of the elderly lady in training were actually organized by the nation’s avowedly Neo-Nazi paramilitary, the ‘Azov Battalion’.

Konstantynovska featured on the front pages of a number of Western newspapers in the past week, including The Financial Times, the Times, the Daily Telegraph, and the Independent – all UK-based papers or news sites. The sabre-rattling stories have also hit Israel’s Haaretz, America’s Fox News, and the Irish Times.

The photographs and media released over the past week show the senior citizen amongst others undergoing weapons and first aid training in the city of Mariupol in south-east Ukraine. The event appears to have been organized and promoted by the Azov Battalion, which formed in 2014 as a volunteer paramilitary organization before integrating into Ukraine’s formal military forces. In late 2021, the Biden regime proposed sending upwards of $300 million to Ukraine’s military, potentially aiding the Azov Battalion.

A spokesman for the group has attempted to dissuade American politicians from stopping funding for the entity, claiming that only one in five of the unit’s members are actual Neo-Nazis. Their efforts, especially with the Biden government, appear to have paid off.

In the middle of the coverage of the group’s training propaganda was NBC News’ chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel.

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