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Comment by pokepim | Hacker News Reader

Well congress approved 500 million for negative coverage of China. So yes, US websites are even paid for shaming and criticizing China (often based on false information) and our asian enemies (like Japan in the 80s with all the Japan bashing)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1985/08/01/l...

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So what? It is still not illegal though, is it?

> Well congress approved 500 million for negative coverage of China.

Can I get a pointer to this?

I just looked this up myself. It was proposed as part of last year's COMPETES act:

https://prospect.org/politics/congress-proposes-500-million-...

I only found articles on this from when the act was still moving through congress. But the act was passed, so I assume this part did as well.

It feels nefarious to me how acts and budgets in the US can bundle things like this.

It's a very old tradition:

>The Spanish-American War, what boosters called a “splendid little war,” began in 1898. … President McKinley sent a warship to Cuba as a precaution, but in February 1898 that ship, the USS Maine, blew up in Havana, killing 250 U.S. sailors. The cause of the explosion was unknown — and it would later be revealed to have been an accident — but both Hearst and Pulitzer published a cable from the captain of the battleship to the assistant secretary of the navy, Theodore Roosevelt, informing him that the disaster was no accident. (The cable was later revealed to be a fake.)

Jill Lepore, September 2018. These Truths: A History of the United States.

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