It's concerted effort by Chinese establishment to whitewash their handling of the whole thing. They even want to pretend that the virus didn't even originate in China!
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/13/asia/china-coronavirus-us...
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/13/asia/china-coronavirus-us...
1. CIA created the virus and released the virus in China as a test.
2. (In Chinese there's no word for 'flu', only 'cold', or 'transmissible cold'.) The 'cold' virus originated in US last year and killed more than 10k Americans before US sent special force to Wuhan to infect us Chinese! Even the head of CDC admitted it (see article).
3. A 5 member US special force went to Wuhan in November. They returned to US and all died in suspicious circumstances.
4. Now all the western countries are sending infected agents into China to blow the epidemic again.
You might notice a common theme that US is the enemy, and they are the originator of all bad things that happened to China. This is not a coincidence.
1. WeChat is heavily patrolled and monitored by the PRC censors. If the PRC doesn't want these rumors to circulate, these rumors would not last more than a hour (or seconds. It's very enlightening to see the sensitive terms get filtered in real time.)
In fact, in the last week or so, I've been getting more conspiracy forwards. The spread of rumors on this topic on WeChat is speeding up.
2. I don't see US' Secretary of State accusing China of intentionally creating the virus.
Reddit tries to stop conspiracy theories with quarantines and bans. But they're rapidly spreading anyway.
> 2. I don't see US' Secretary of State accusing China of intentionally creating the virus.
It really is symmetric: Tom Cotton, Senator from Arkansas, has been on Fox saying exactly this.
Fox also has other people on saying it was a joint North Korean and Chinese bioweapon, made solely to attack America, but released initially in China as a decoy. Fox is the most watched cable news channel in America.
But in the current one, who gets on Fox seems to be a more reliable indicator of the thinking of the ruling clique than official pronouncements. Stuff that gets repeated on Fox enough tends to end up coming out of the President's mouth eventually. Official pronouncements from Secretaries of Suchandsuch get countermanded by tweet. One of the President's closest advisors broadcasts on Fox nightly.
"Blame China" is a simple message and it would not be rational to think it is not going to be tweet-official policy soon enough.
I think you're just grasping at straws because you've already decided what narrative you want. In which case there's nothing more for me to say here.
Senators are within the top 100 most powerful people in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes
Use of the phrases like these, exemplifying the tu quoque logical fallacy, was an attempt to deflect criticism of the Soviet Union by referring to racial discrimination and lynching in the United States.
It is not "Classic Chinese / Soviet tactic (TM)". It is a friggin natural sense of justice that normal people possess.
They're so at odds they agreed to give the Pentagon $100B more this year than last, in addition to loosening accounting rules so they can hide even more of their shenanigans from the taxpayer. They're so at odds that Gitmo is still open, we're still fighting in a dozen nations, we're undermining the democratic governments of several more, and they just gave the next appointed coup leader a unanimous standing ovation at the state of the union ("it's not good!") speech. They're so at odds that to contest an election with a loud-mouthed incoherent corrupt old person with shady Ukraine connections, they've chosen... a loud-mouthed incoherent corrupt old person with shady Ukraine connections.
They're so at odds that when the government decided they needed to destroy a journalist for doing journalism, for revealing to the USA voter and tax payer the evil shit done with their votes and taxes, not a single journalist anyone had ever heard of spoke up in his defense. Oh yeah, that MSM is speaking "truth to power" now. Good grief.
Yes, the American media isn’t perfect, but deriding it as “fake news” while CCTV a somehow put on a pedestal just seems really wrong. The fact is that it is at least independent of the government and doesn’t have to act in the interest in the ruling executive (and in fact, depending on who is president, there will always be plenty of media that isn’t friendly to their agenda).
The first thing authoritarians do when they gain power is to try and delegitimize the free press so they can get rid of it. That is exactly wha it is going on now, and whenever someone uses the term MSM, that is what I know their agenda is.
For all that they caterwaul about surface controversies like is it worse to arrange corrupt positions at foreign firms for one's children or is it worse to investigate such positioning, Fox and MSNBC agree about everything important to the rich bastards who own both the media and the government. For instance, China: we're told constantly by both (all) news firms to fear China. In this very thread there is evidence of a widespread derangement stemming from that constant gaslighting. ("What if the masks are pre-impregnated with virus?!%?") After all, China is an independent nation with a military! USA military-industrial complex might make a lot of money losing a war with China! They must all be evil bastards bent on destroying us! Oh but they're not as bad as Russia! Or Iran! Or Venezuela! Or some random goat enthusiasts in some desert somewhere! When the topic is a war into which we haven't yet blundered, there is unanimity in the war media. (Since you're language policing, tell me: is "war media" better or worse than "MSM" that you derided upthread? On the one hand, it's evocative and focused on the bottom line. On the other, it is one more syllable... I can't decide!)
China is played in western media because that is the perception that their audiences want to see. It isn’t universally negative either, it just is what it is. Media reports negative stories about everyone (not just China), because negative news sells more than positive news and unlike CCTV, they have to pay the bills.
In the short term, though, you're mostly right. News media firms program to increase audience engagement. Rachel Maddow didn't particularly enjoy turning her program into all-Trump-all-the-time in mid-2015, but she couldn't really help it. There was a large portion of the cable news audience that couldn't resist the frisson that came from seeing that one guy who had said mean things to people on that one TV show now saying other mean things to other people on the news. These morons would tune into to anything Trump (to some extent, they will still), and as Les Moonves observed it was "damn good" for the bottom line.
It's tempting to assume that the modern news media firm doesn't really care about which direction their product points. The particular cars that crashed don't really matter when the morons just want to see car crashes. We could hypothesize an efficient market and be smug in the sure knowledge that there are no long-term trends. Or, we could pull our heads out of our asses and actually observe the trends.
Maybe USA is so irredeemably racist that China is an easy mark for this sort of media malpractice. Somehow our racism has ignored all of sub-Saharan Africa? And somehow Israel is not only not despised, but is actually celebrated, despite the fact they are every bit as awful to Palestinians as China is to Uighurs? This is a strange reflection of common USA prejudice!
In fact, Israel purchases (often with USA tax money) large quantities of armaments from USA armaments manufacturers. The moment they stopped doing that, or alternatively the moment their rivals seemed likely to purchase even more armaments in hopes of finally destroying them, would be the moment they were seen in a very different light in USA news media. In the long run, every stupid misguided war USA or its proxies fight is preceded by a long run of news media demonization. Maybe that's just a natural thing, but I'm suspicious.
To the downvoters - explain.