by Mike Whitney, The Unz Review:
Is the western media even-handed in its coverage of China? And how has this impacted public perception of China in America?
Ron Unz—I think the Western media has been overwhelmingly biased against China, a bias that stretches back for decades but has steadily grown worse during the 2010s and especially the last few years.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
Coverage has recently become so extremely dishonest and distorted that it reminds me of the how the old Soviet media portrayed the West even as the USSR went into severe decline and eventually collapsed, and I think that unfortunate analogy is a very relevant one. Furthermore, much of our academic world has followed this same pattern of totally distorting the reality of China and its relationship with the U.S.
Some of the worst examples of these media falsehoods only came to my attention during the last decade.
For more than 35 years the American media has annually denounced the Chinese government for its supposed 1989 massacre of protesting students at Tiananmen Square, but there seems overwhelming evidence that incident never happened, and was just a Western propaganda-hoax, endlessly repeated by our media.
For example, the former Beijing bureau chief of the Washington Post personally covered those events at the time, and he later published a long article setting the record straight, but his account has always been ignored. Articles published in the New York Times by its own Beijing bureau chief said much the same thing, but these also had no impact. Numerous other sources, including secret American diplomatic cables disclosed by Wikileaks have confirmed these facts, but our biased, lazy, or ignorant journalists have never paid any attention and for decades continued to promote the myth of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Last year I published a long article summarizing all of this evidence.
Another egregious example was the 1999 American bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, an illegal attack that killed or wounded nearly two dozen Chinese. Our government and media have always described this as a tragic accident, while denouncing and ridiculing China for claiming that the bombing was deliberate.
But once again, there is overwhelming evidence that the Chinese government was entirely correct and our own government was lying, with our dishonest media endorsing and amplifying those lies. Indeed, a NATO officer was even quoted in a leading British newspaper as bragging that the guided bomb had struck exactly the intended room in the embassy. I discussed this in another section of that same article.
- American Pravda: Gaza Protests and the Legend of the Tiananmen Square Massacre
Uncovering the False Media Narrative of Tiananmen Square
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • May 13, 2024 • 8,800 Words
A few years after America’s 2008 mortgage meltdown nearly brought down the world financial system, I published a long article contrasting China’s growing success with America’s recent record of failure. My piece emphasized that the Western media and much of the Western academic world often portrayed and contrasted the two countries in ways that were the exact opposite of the reality.