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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