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.
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.