Freedom of press is not the same as unbiased press. For example, US citizens can watch Chinese news media in the US, but Chinese people cannot watch US news in China.
It is trivial for the US to allow foreign media on US grounds if noone watches it.
If the foreign media becomes popular, the pipe will soon play a different tune.
Case in point: TikTok.
https://rsf.org/en/news/whistleblowing-doctor-missing-after-...
This is how "independent media" work in most countries that have such a thing: different outlets are controlled by different people, resulting in some diversity of opinion, but not every idea gets the same airtime. Of course the definition of "going wild" is different in a Chinese context.
Also, from the article you linked:
> 04/13/2020 UPDATE RSF has taken note of the video published on the Weibo account of the whistleblower Ai Fen, which suggests that she is free to move, and hopes that it was not staged by the Chinese regime.
That depends on what you mean by "freedom of anything". Are people allowed to do everything they want to? No. Are they doing it anyway? Yes.
More concretely with regards to freedom of speech: Are independent media allowed? No. Do they exist anyway? Yes.
> Their government is attempting to govern their lives with a mandatory government issued social media account.
What? That part makes me wonder whether all my knowledge is outdated because I haven't been to China this year and nobody told me about this or whether it's you who's been away for too long.
Likely true, but irrelevant.
(FWIW, there are more English speakers in China than America. Also, historically, at one time there were more Christians in Asia than in Europe. There was a Bishop of Beijing. I read up on the history of the old Silk Road a while back.)
The point is that you don't get thrown in jail if the authorities notice you watching the other fellow's broadcasts.
No one in the West is going to jail for watching TikTok, eh?
They could, but they don't, because they wouldn't understand a thing. So in practice, I think the situation is reversed: there are more people in China who watch US news than people in the US who watch Chinese news.
Not affiliated with the bug tracker RT, in case you were wondering.
Corbyn himself is far-left (again by U.K. standards), but the Parliamentary Labour Party itself gave him 172-40 against in a vote of no confidence in 2016, only for the public members to vote for him 313,209-193,229 in the subsequent leadership contest.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Labour_Party_leadership...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/11/trump-nuclear-agains...
This seems like a less than promising title for those of us who are interested in what is objectively true. A quick skim of the first three strawman-filled minutes of the video does not make me feel any better.
It's true, one can indeed find plenty of batshit insane ideas within the conspiracy world. Similarly, one can find plenty of dark-complexioned people engaged in fisticuffs on /r/fightporn. What speculative conclusions one should form based on these two facts is a matter of opinion.
A better example would be the tendency of the left to mark anyone they disagree with as “racist”. Same strategy. Mark your opponents as something that’s so bad that no further discussion can be allowed.
You can attach whatever label you would like to something, it has no effect on whether it is objectively true (in shared, physical reality), it only affects people's perceptions of its truth (virtual reality). This applies both to conspiracy theories, as well as mainstream news theories. There is surely a difference between which class of theories has larger epistemic variance between physical and virtual reality, but this variance exists on a per story basis, and should therefore be analyzed at that level. No one has ever done such a comparative analysis (as far as I know, correct me if I'm wrong), despite what mainstream news theorists would have the public believe.
> A better example would be the tendency of the left to mark anyone they disagree with as “racist”. Same strategy. Mark your opponents as something that’s so bad that no further discussion can be allowed.
An excellent example indeed.
There is an actual far left in the UK though, primarily represented by the Communist Party of Britain. There are other smaller groups too, mostly linked to the wider trade union movement.
Those are government-sponsored, explicitly foreign-facing (the language is a big hint) mouthpieces that are about as representative of "US news" as the sites you link are representative of "Chinese news" (i.e. barely).
RFA:
https://www.rfa.org/about/info/frequencies.html
VOA:
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
A nice example of what one U.S. journalist knew regarding the coverage of North Korea in 2013:
https://www.northkoreatech.org/2013/04/11/us-wants-voa-rfa-t...
As I understand it, using a VPN to get past the firewall is a crime for Chinese nationals. And the govt is constantly blocking them anyway as they find them.
Of course they are. Can you point to any mainland Chinese news outlets which are not effectively controlled by the CCP?
If not, it follows that a foreigner reading or watching this stuff gets a pretty good idea of what mainland Chinese are being fed by their news media.