Westerners are the most propagandized people on the planet. While, yes, something like CCTV is clearly biased, people who watch CCTV can at least tell you it is biased and admit they are getting info from a particular point of view. Westerners have a tendency to not view their propaganda as biased at all, but merely as "facts" and "common sense". They don't even see the BBC, PBS, RFA, VOCMF, CNN, MSNBC, etc, as a particular point of view with its own agenda. They just gobble it up as the unbiased truth.

It's why there are so many subreddits, Discord servers, etc, which have a rule that bans "talking about politics", but then somehow this rule never seems to apply to western media propaganda. They will randomly start China bashing and if you disagree they will accuse you of talking about politics and ban you. Because to them, these absurd headlines about China are not a particular point of view pushed by their media for geopolitical reasons but is simply a "fact" with no political content.

It's why they will accept tons of media being filled with western propaganda, like movies and games that include modern military equipment often working directly with the US military to make them and being required to depict the US military positively and to allow the US military to edit and remove anything from the movie or game, they see this as not "political" but if a game removes something because of outcry from Chinese fans or there is some leftist message put in a game, they will decry it as "bringing politics into my video games!"

The word "propaganda" in and of itself has a bit of a foreign connotation in English, by that I mean that it's often associated with things from foreign countries and not from your own. People tend to see "propaganda" as "something foreign countries have" and not something they have to worry about.

No matter how hard you try, for the vast majority, you cannot even get them to consider the possibility that maybe a media organization created directly by the US government through an act of Congress with an explicitly stated purpose of pushing ideas to disparage countries like China might be an incredibly biased source and might have be inclined to push narratives to further a geopolitical agenda, and when his only citation is an "anonymous" source maybe you shouldn't take it too seriously.

This is pretty much impossible to even get them to consider. It's like they have some blocker in their brain that makes it nearly impossible for them to even entertain this idea in their head.

It's also why they call us things like "wumao" and "Russian bot", because since they believe their media is simply "fact", they legitimately believe it's not even possible to actually disagree with it. That means if you claim to disagree with it, in their mind, you must be lying. And why would you lie? Because you must be paid to do it!

It's even further the reason why they are so ready to support invasions, sanctioning, bombing, etc of other countries, because in their mind, since no one can truly disagree with western propaganda except those who are paid for it, they genuinely believe the people of these countries all themselves agree with western propaganda. They think while the Chinese government, for example, pushes one narrative, in reality, all the citizens of China secretly believe the western narrative and are begging for their white saviors to "liberate" them.

It's why they say "I support the people but not the government of China", because they genuinely think they are saviors of the Chinese people from their evil government and the Chinese people secretly want to be "liberated" by them. But I have seen this façade break down very quickly in the rare instances that they actually talk to a Chinese person, they don't agree with their beliefs, and then the yankee accuses the Chinese person of being a "brainwashed ultranationalist" simply for not hating their own country and its achievements.

from https://np.reddit.com/r/GenZedong/comments/uwwvqn/interesting_i_wonder_what_that_source_is/i9usz08/