I would say it cannot be categorized as propaganda. NYTimes editors seem to be decent people. However, that's very dangerous because its more deceptive to spread fake information(i.e. the civilized internatinal communtity is fighting against a evil regime abusing human rights) unintentionally that eventually will cause more conflicts.

It's quite insteresting that while most English speaking community blame Chinese censorship, there's an invisible censorship of political correctness that prohibit the other side of the story which might be truth. The same invisible "censorship" makes me use current throw way id because my opinion based on what I know seems very evil motivated or might take money from CPP.

Chinese speaking media have different stories which lead majority of Chinese having different oppinions than Westners' naive human rights view based on their moral superiority. To them the the narrative of HK events is another lie just like WMD. The response to Morey is an angry response to defamation , not bully to freedome of speech that US politicians and journalist love to describ about Chinese government.

Ironically it's also NY Time disclose some information about the other side of story[0].But thats a very small piece. There are much more than that. Westeners just don't know because of invisible collective censorship. The people under visible censorship some times know 2 sides stories while the other side are easily fooled by the "independent" journalists who distort the reality based on own their values and invisible censorship. I'm also using the opportunity to see how many downvotes I can collect as an observation of invisible censorship.

[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/07/world/asia/hong-kong-prot...