NEWS//Western news is fake, China says
China's media outlets accuse Western media of creating fake news.
Covid
An opinion piece in China's Global Times (August 4) calls out Western media for gloating over a resurgence in Chinese covid cases. Wenwen Wang, the chief reporter of the Global Times and a commentator on US politics and Asian security, writes:
China is currently facing the outbreak of the highly contagious Delta variant, the severest ever since the Wuhan outbreak early last year. With past experiences in hand, Chinese authorities in various cities affected swiftly conducted massive testing for local residents and applied close-off management on communities, in a bid to put the new outbreaks under control as soon as possible.
However, as China is coping with the new challenge, the Western media do not sit still, even when their own countries are facing worsening epidemic caused by Delta variant…. The Western media's malicious will toward China has not changed even if in the past year China played the most formidable role in the world's anti-pandemic fight.
Flooding
Another reporter for Global Times, Haidong Li, complained about the Western press making up stories about recent flooding in China. He complimented the citizens of Zhengzhou for refusing to cooperate with Western journalists who "have been smearing and demonizing China." He continues, "There is no secret that these media outlets are ideologically biased and values-oriented, particularly when it comes to China."
Media as social control
On August 4, China Global Television Network (CGTN) published an opinion piece by Maitreya Bhakal, a news commentator from India, titled, Why Western media lie and spread misinformation about China. Bhakal states, "In the West, especially the U.S., the media serves as a form of social control. U.S. leaders have perfected the art of keeping people on a tight leash. The U.S. population is kept under strict observation and surveillance, and almost all political activity is heralded into a highly restrictive 'two-party' system – all the while making people believe that they are 'free.'“
Vaccines
Early this year, Tom Fowdy, writing for China.org.cn, charged that "the Western mainstream media has persistently portrayed Chinese vaccines in a negative light, depicting them as unreliable, dangerous and amplifying doubts toward them…. It is quite clear that there is a campaign to discredit China's vaccines – one which is motivated more by politics than facts."