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?
Avoiding the topic altogether is not as bad an idea as you may think; it avoids adding any fuel to the fire of potential infighting disputes. Removing it entirely from the discussion means that it doesn't even indirectly fan the flames of war. I've not got a problem with that.
IDK I really don't buy that as a good reason to not call out American media's bias against China.
If this is their thinking that's extremely cowardly on their part. They have a platform from which they could make it more difficult for the US government and media to stoke tension with China and not using it is a failure.
They’ve defended China several times with one off statements.
See, this is why I created this thread - for more information. That's good to know and supports it not being a dislike of China, thanks.
I agree they do good work. I'd still like to see a China episode, though, because I think it's the big propaganda push of this era and it deserve an in-depth dismantling.
I think it’s the big propaganda push of this era
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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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They are part of the lib-to-left pipeline. Any minimal perceived support for China would turn a lot of people off, and yet their work as a whole led us here. At some point the contradiction will need to be resolved, but as of now I don't think they have enough influence for a China episode to sway hearts and minds.
I think right now there is way more (and more horrific) propaganda about China than the DPRK, so the stakes are higher. I'm still conflicted because the longer we wait the more entrenched the propaganda becomes, but there are better ways to gain people's trust than to stan an Evil Enemy country. Know your audience I guess.
I'm not asking for them to stan China, just to cover the incredibly obvious ways the media lies and misleads when covering them, as they did with the DPRK.
OK, then fuck 'em (edit: the libs, that is). If doing it for the DPRK and Iran hasn't scared people off, then neither will doing it for China. In fact, the longer they wait, the longer the cold war ramps up, the worse the reaction would be.
In those cases, since the big stuff happened long ago, they have declassified CIA documents to refer to, right? Do such docs exist for China yet? (that can't conceivably be construed as biased)
You absolutely don't need declassified docs. You have the Chinese documents that the news bases their reports on, then the reports themselves. Just the differences in framing between the two are big enough to fill a whole episode.
The Zenz thing alone could also fill an episode, and is well documented and proven. RFA, same thing - this one is even covered by declassified CIA documents.
When you introduce someone to communism, you would never start by talking about Stalin. You work gradually from Che Guevara
DPRK is a weird little hermit country that keeps its own population hostage, but nobody is really scared of it.
China is a global empire that has infiltrated the US and is keeping us hostage, so we are right to fear them.
China is much higher stakes. Fear is much stronger than some vague concern for human rights in a country they can't place on a map.
That's true, but you can pretty easily make similar points for China, given the right examples. It's seriously obvious in many cases.
Is there any indication that they're deliberately avoiding it, apart from propaganda storm you mentioned?
Other than it being the single most obvious possible subject for a media bias podcast in 2021 which they've completely ignored, it's been requested and they pointedly ignore it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CitationsNeeded/comments/eki0fz/citations_needed_blocks_user_for_requesting_an/
Ugh, Twitter shit? Pass.
Jokes aside, Adam in particular is like, way too online. He's on Twitter all the time, I've seen him take like half a dozen "breaks" from it and post all the way through it lol. So I'm not going to read too far into them having blocked somebody for that tweet.
Would be interesting to see if they responded to a request on Patreon for one? Not that I'm going to sign up to their Patreon, lol.
That's why I posted here, wanted more people to weigh in and see if we can figure out what's going on.
And lol @ Patreon, let me just tie all my subversive media consumption to a credit card in my name.
Yeah, exactly. I considered supporting some smaller YouTubers I liked for a while, but I tried to sign up to Patreon with a fake name and burner email address (didn't even get to the credit card stage) and they immediately locked my account and asked for government issue ID to prove my identity lmao. No thanks.
I suspect they're avoiding China in the podcast because it's a difficult topic to cover.
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There's a lot of background to go through for debunking sources and claims. They'd basically need a short series to cover even one talking point.
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There's also sinophobia on the left so they'd need to do a stellar job and very carefully craft their position. This is assuming they wouldn't feel the urge to both sides it a bit, in which case they also need to avoid alienating people sick of that crap.
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There's often very little in the way of information to displace various claims. Information out of China is limited, particularly in the English language. We mostly get heavy-handed bullshitting from Westerners with links to US state dept, military, and intelligence. This makes it take even longer to explain/debunk because you can't just say, "no actually this happened", you have to more subtly explain why the claims are so dubious that they should be rejected even though you don't know more about on the ground conditions after acknowledging this.
Yeah, this definitely makes some sense as a motivation, good point.
This is assuming they wouldn’t feel the urge to both sides it a bit, in which case they also need to avoid alienating people sick of that crap.
:cringe: hope not
"We're not saying China never does bad things, far from it. [A list, part of which drives you crazy]. But there's a uniquely insidious way in which the media spreads [rephrasing of the topic of the episode]."
You know it would have to happen, lol. It's their formula.
See, these are the :LIB: :brainworms: I was referring to in the OP. Also, lmao that sounds exactly like them.
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I like to refer to them as "what NPR should be". As others said, they're a great pied Piper for libs to come left
If you look at Adam's writings for FAIR, there's a considerable amount of articles debunking anti-China yellow peril propaganada
Excellent, it's really looking like it's not bias. Guess they have some other reason, hope they decide to make an episode on the subject.
