The :citations-needed: boys seem like good kids, but listening to them, they haven't completely eliminated their :LIB: :brainworms: .
One manifestation of this is that they seem to be deliberately avoiding a China episode, on the eve of a new cold war and in the middle of a propaganda storm. It appears that Adam has written many articles debunking anti-China stuff, so it doesn't look like it's bias. Please offer your speculation on why there's no episode of CN about it in the comments.
Anyone got any thoughts?
That might just be your internet feeds skewing your perception. There's no reason to think the propaganda is worse Iran or Venezuela unless your plugged into certain subreddits.
CN rarely covers a specific country. They usually focus on the tactics of propaganda not the campaigns themselves. When they do it's because there's a pressing and immediate danger. China simply isn't in danger. China is not at risk of suffering from US sanctions and war with China is still laughable. China doesn't need some NY podcasters to stan them.
I've got a few problems with this:
It's not an internet thing (take the Uyghur Genocide, for example), and it's different from Iran or Venezuela because consequences of any conflict with China are much, much larger. It's clear to anyone watching that the American apparatus is moving to oppose China now.
They covered North Korea, which certainly wasn't very likely to be annihilated by the US right away. In fact, the DPRK has been cornered by the US for many years, whereas the massive opposition to China is a new development. Same thing with Iran.
I don't want them to stan China, I want them to make an in-depth analysis of the media coverage, which is literally their whole thing.
While the US rattles over xianxang the threat of them doing anything of affect is funding extremists, which might be mitigated since the Taliban takeover of afgahnistan.. Open conflict is still laughable. The US has little capacity to actually hurt the Chinese in any meaningful way.
North Korea is constantly starving and suffering due to US sanctions. Saying we can't "anihliate" them ignores that. The US is in no position to do anything of the sort to China. The DPRK episode also serves as a general lesson of how deep US propaganda can go and serves as a ice breaker to general US propaganda.
You need to better understand the syllabus of the podcast. They don't do general episodes like "everything the US media is lying to you about X"; thats youtube clickbait. They cover how the US media lies to you and why they do so. At best, China episode would be a news brief about xiangxan and zenz. But it wouldn't really teach the listeners anything that hasn't been covered in other episodes and so would indistinguishable from basic pro-china indoctrination.
There's also (what I suspect to be) the main issue: The listener can't actually do anything after being inoculated against anti-china propaganda. There's no call to action because China doesn't need any help. Almost every other episode is about crime or housing reporting because that's where their listeners can have the most impact. They do a two part episode on Palestine because there is BDS and suffering Palestinians. There's nothing like that for China. Doing an episode on China serves no purpose other than to taut their personal politics. Its about as useful as them swearing fealty to China.
They do and have several times, and covering the specific ways the US media lies and misleads about China isn't pro-China indoctrination. They also do actual news briefs on the show, but that's beside the point.
As for the DPRK, of course the US has been strangling them for years. That's my point - it wasn't some kind of new thing, so I'm not sure "pressing and imminent danger" applies so much. The DPRK wasn't going to collapse any more than it was the year before, or the year after. There was Nuclear saber-rattling and media attention, but that's also nothing new and is similar to the increased China coverage.
Your point that China probably isn't going to suffer nearly as much is completely fair, though. When I said consequences of conflict would be much, much larger, I meant the international ramifications of a new cold war. Obviously a hot war is out of the question.
Media bias against China is massive and works in a few specific ways, just like with the DPRK and Iran. It's a perfectly reasonable subject for an episode, and your contention that only harassed underdogs deserve defending against slander (and that defense against slander is indoctrination) is extremely strange.