zhang.dianli

I make no secret of my absolute disdain for the press. Any press. Any country. The previous link is pinned to my Mastodon profile and it's just a long, ill-tempered rant about just how badly the press sucks as an institution.

Today I'm going to highlight, far more brieflyin just as obsessive depth, a specific case of narrative-building which I will use to expound upon some propaganda techniques used in the world press.

CNN is press, press sucks, ergo CNN sucks; Q.E.D.

We open with a link to a story on CNN: “China Eastern takes delivery of the world’s first made-in-China C919 jet” Since CNN is noted for editing published stories in subtle ways with only cryptic comments buried at the bottom to indicate this, I'm going to also nab a snapshot of the offending passage:

The text, for those using screen readers, is this:

The C919 currently relies heavily on Western components, including engines and flight control systems, from companies such as GE (GE), Safran (SAFRF), and Honeywell International (HON).

This is a very weird thing to put into a news report. When CNN reported on the release of the Airbus A380 I don't recall seeing a paragraph like this:

The A380 currently relies heavily on American components including engines from Engine Alliance (GE/P&W) ...

Nor do I remember a paragraph like this on reportage from the release of the Boeing 737-MAX:

The 737-MAX currently relies heavily on French components including engine technology from Safran ...

So why the difference?

Hint: It's just the narrative

The difference lies in exactly why I despise the press: there is a narrative that the press wants to establish based on its masters, and that narrative drives all reportage. Western media is owned by a very small number of very wealthy people or by governments these days. Each has its own agenda, naturally, but in general billionaires want the same thing (low taxes, open trade with impunity), and governments in the west tend to be beholden to billionaires to varying degrees.

China's very existence as the #2 world economy (and rising fast) is a threat to this wannabe oligarchy since the Chinese government caters to a disjoint set of billionaires (i.e. not western billionaires) and, too, tends to actually worry more about long-term stability over short-term gains. Chinese governance, especially as exemplified by just how stunningly badly the west handled COVID-19, is a threat to the burgeoning plutocracy the billionaire class is building in the west with such single-minded patience.

Obviously this cannot stand. So the west's propaganda instruments (their much-vaunted “free press”, beholden to monied interests yet somehow still laughably called “free”) tell narratives. Fairy stories, really, with just enough truth to them to let the unwary (most readers) not see the meticulous use of classic story-telling techniques.

What are these techniques?

There are several techniques used. I'll address three examples of them:

• casual dismissal of accomplishment;
• othering; and,
• motive-mongering.

Casual dismissal of accomplishment

The example I used above is the technique of casual dismissal of accomplishment. “They'd never have done it without outside help.” You see it in this article about the COMAC C919 aircraft. (It's all western technology that's just being assembled in China, you see.) You see it in reportage over China's space program. (The space capsules are Soviet in design. Ignore the fact that they're larger, completely different on the interior, with better avionics than any Russian capsule has ever had in the entire history of its space program.) You see it in reports on China's electrical grid, on China's rail system, on China's shipbuilding capacity, on China's naval vessels, on China's military (and now civil) aviation ... they always include how it was “really” someone else's work that the Chinese are just aping.

And yes, I used that word “aping” for a reason: that's literally what people in the west largely think of the Chinese: subhuman.

Othering

In that long rant I linked earlier, I spent quite a bit of time babbling about the so-called facekini “craze”. There never was such a craze, naturally, and you can find evidence of this fact in the very reports on it themselves. A lot of creative photographic techniques had to be used to make it look like the facekini was a craze, to the point that this could not be an accident. People were deliberately and carefully cropping out or blurring out all the evidence that the facekini was not an actual craze.

Why?

Because the narrative has to show that the Chinese are just “weird” and “different” to otherwise “other” them. Ideally this should be done in a way that makes the reader feel superior.

Other versions of othering included all the utter and complete bullshit about masks in China where ignorant know-nothings mouthed off in media about how the Chinese were more prone to wearing masks because they believed in “Qi” and in conserving it. This is damnable violence to the memory and reputation of one Wu Liande who used evidence-based science to invent the use of PPE for mitigating and reversing horrible epidemic diseases.

You know those modern-day N95 masks that the west is (rightly!) so proud of? They're a direct descendent of the Wu mask of 1910. (Why is reportage on the N95s not commenting that these would not exist had Wu not invented the notion of PPE? I mean aside from the obvious racism.)

And, ironically, this othering has killed more westerners than Chinese despite the obvious long-haul intent. By othering the Chinese, the western press pretty much guaranteed that these manuals published by the Chinese government starting in FEBRUARY 2020 would never be followed by anybody in the west. The Handbook of COVID-19 Prevention and Treatment alone has been available (and constantly updated with the latest information) since February of 2020. As have manuals for constructing proper care and treatment wards, etc. But because it was Chinese, and the Chinese are “different from us”, it was pretty much guaranteed that, when combined with the innate white supremacy of western thought, that the advice and research contained within those publications would never be followed to infamous effect:

Motive-mongering

This dovetails nicely into the final technique I'd like to cover: motive-mongering. When you can't plausibly dismiss accomplishment, and when “othering” backfires, as it did in COVID-19 handling, there's another card you can play that will Trump all others (see what I did there?): you can cast aspersions on the motives of the “other”.

It seems daily, now, when I even bother opening a news site, that China's motives in everything are questioned. China is visiting Saudi Arabia—obviously they want to undermine America's rightful claim on Saudi oil! China is making good telephone equipment—obviously this is so they can do surveillance on the west! China makes a social media site that's a runaway success among young people—obviously they just want to spy on western youth so they can find leverage against them later on in their lives!

This would be hilarious were it not so dangerous!

Why hilarious?

1. The reports on Xi's visit to Saudi Arabia are just shy of saying the quiet part out loud: the USA feels they have a proprietary claim on Saudi oil and find it very upsetting that the Saudis might start doing business with China instead of the USA.

2. The reports on how grave a threat Chinese telephone equipment is to western interests are basically based on what we already know: every major vendor of telephony equipment in the west has espionage back doors in them to spy on people in other countries. (They've repeatedly revealed this in reports about how they caught famous international criminals and terrorists.) These breathless reports are very much hypocrisy writ large.

3. The hysterical arm-flapping over TikTok very carefully ignores that every single western social media site without exception siphons up every bit of data they can from users and non-users(!) and sells that information to whoever ponies up the cash, even foreign powers. (Facebook and Russia, for example.)

Why dangerous?

Well, I've already pointed out why bad reportage over COVID-19 and China led to millions of preventable deaths, so I won't flog that horse much more. But it goes deeper and darker than that. There's very clear war drums sounding right now, and the press, instead of questioning if this is even sane, is leaping right in to amplify the sticks on the drum heads. Ever since the collapse of the Союз Советских Социалистических Республик (СССР), the west has tried a series of existential threats to throw up in the faces of the general public in an attempt to distract attention away from domestic problems (like the USA's completely broken “democracy” or Europe's fatal error in breaking the rules for EU membership to accept nations willy-nilly or the UK's fatal Brexit error or ...). In my lifetime I've noticed these existential threats shoved in my face:

• The Cold War
• The War on Drugs (brown-skinned people from Mexico and further south)
• The War on Terror (brown-skinned people from the middle east, plus innocents mistaken as such by ignoramuses)
• Russia (round 1, at about the point Putin started gathering power)
• China (round 1, as the Beijing Olympics started to get coverage)
• Russia (round 2, at about the time that they seconded Crimea)
• China (round 2, at about the time that Chinese military technology started getting actually good)
• Russia and China (because somehow China is being blamed for Russia invading Ukraine)

I've probably overlooked several in that list, but the point remains: everything is reported through a lens of othered motivational speculation. “They” are evil because “they” are different from us and “their” motives are vile and dangerous and a threat to our existence! So don't look at the problems that are actually around you and actually impact you on a daily basis. That is what “they” want! Don't be a sucker!

And this is heading inexorably to war because there is nothing quite as dangerous as an uneducated and/or ignorant populace being driven into a frenzy by demagogues trying to conceal their own shenanigans.

So what can we do?

Well for starters, stop giving the press so much power. You live in a world now where you can directly talk to people anywhere in the world, practically. DO THAT! Don't rely on unreliable narrators with an agenda set by oligarchs to filter the world for you. Talk to the people that are actually at issue. You'll likely find that, aside from superficial surface issues, most people are not as different from you as your masters would have you believe.

I'm not saying you should stop reading the press. I'm saying you should read the press far more critically than you're doing now. I'm saying you should in particular be very wary of confirmation bias when reacting to press. Read the press from a variety of sources. Find out what people who are nominally different from you are saying. I'm also saying you should take the press to task when they distort the truth and/or flatly lie. They are supposed to serve us, not the other way around. Democracies in particular cannot succeed with a weak, craven, beholden press.

But that's only part of it. You do have to supplement the press with reports from regular people elsewhere: the clichéd “boots on the ground”. Build up social media circles that aren't algorithmically designed to put you into an echo chamber. Reach out past political, racial, cultural divides and broaden your horizons.

Or be ready for destructive war that will bring you immense misery. It's really your choice.