I genuinely went to read this in good faith since it's The Intercept (I know it's not great, but it's not CNN) but decided to do a quick text search for Zenz just to make sure. And of course, the whole fucking thing is full of Zenz.
This is just ridiculous at this point. I really don't want to be a genocide-denier if there is actually one happening, but for fuck's sake this is just ridiculous, LET ME SEE ONE REPORT ON THIS WITHOUT ZENZ ALL OVER IT.
Yeah, but why always him tho? Why smear your reporting with shit by including him? He doesn't even speak/read their language -- how is he the ONLY one that keeps getting these scoops and reports?
I'm sorry, but as I said to another comment. If somebody in the US based most of their article on shit Alex Jones uncovered, nobody would take it seriously -- no matter how true it actually was. You would ignore the whole article -- which is what I choose to do with every article that has anything to do with Zenz (which is like 99% of the most serious allegations).
I think it is a combination of media clout, the fact that some of his stuff has come out to be broadly correct, and since he's anti china he got propped up be large media outlets so now the whole thing has snowballed and he gets cited because he's somehow become "the guy" to cite even though there are much better people like Byler to go to. Left media has been sounding the alarm bells for years about conditions in Xinjiang, including left media inside of China before security was tightened.
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IDK, here's a dive someone did into one of the first pieces Zenz did 2018 and basically chocks the paper up to broadly correct but his Chinese isn't very good and his citations aren't either (in that they had to go contact Zenz to send the documents because they couldn't find them, but he did send them and the person was later able to find them). I also from knowing who interacts with the person who does this blog that they do speak Mandarin pretty well.
Funny enough, there's a whole episode on Sinica about Chinese pro-democracy figures that were siding with Trump right after the election based on twitter posts and the like. So liberal idiocy definitely runa in both directions.
By the way, the hosts of Sinica are pro-democracy, anti-authoritarians liberal types (one more optimistic and one more pessimistic), so their takes tend to go in the direction of a "both sides" approach to US-China politics, which make them a bit more nuanced and worth critically engaging and debating than the usual shameless western propaganda. For example, they had a great episode recently with Indian reporters who cover China talking about the dearth of Indian knowledge about China and the hosts kept chiming in with variations of "sounds about as ignorant as the US then."
They covered Xinjiang a while back but I never listened to it so I don't know how credulous they are about the reporting. I'm sure it's not great.