If we had the CIA manual on how these ops are supposed to run I'd guess it would describe everything in stages. The anti-China campaign is a long term plan.

What I believe is most likely the explanation is that there are multiple stages and the first one was the aggressive media campaign.

The next stage is normalization, now that it is "common sense" that China is committing genocide or whatever you pull back on the media campaign and let the various online communities and "independent" media outlets push the narrative themselves, we are in this stage and you can see this by how tankie pro-china shill genocidal denier all got mushed together on social media. If you couldn't be pro China before now it is impossible not to be labeled as any or all those things.

I this stage think the pullback from the media is intentional in order to not create fatigue, I think it is normal that when people are bombarded with the same topic over and over they start to not give a shit because 1) nothing is being done about it because US isn't going to war or anything like it and 2) nothing they can personally do about it as it is outside the electoral cycle.

From now on they'll periodically push the topic in order to keep it fresh and keep it normalized. I also think they are ok with the pushback because it normalizes the us vs them mentality, if nobody argues against it eventualy you'll start doubting where/who are these damn tankies who defend China I never seem them anywhere? By allowing pushback it makes the enemy visible and easily identifiable.

Also we are not in control of any media outlet and our reach is very limited, they really couldn't care less about some Reddit poster getting 1k upvotes on a pro-China comment debunking some article(just claim it is some CCP shill on CCP controled Reddit lol), this is meaningless compared to how much information people consume.

We'll only know for sure if the CIA dropped Zens a few years from now when he drops to obscurity. Right now he is still being named on mainstream articles.