MSM Smear Merchants Target Critics Of Establishment China Narratives

"Missing entirely from the article, conspicuously, is any argument or evidence that @TheGrayzoneNews has ever published any false information. About Xinjiang, or about anything else." https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/msm-smear-merchants-target-critics-of-establishment-china-narratives-efcbe9c503aa

(I know I said I might be taking a couple days off, but just ignore me when I say silly things like that.)

"As the US-centralized empire’s slow-motion third world war against unabsorbed governments continues to accelerate, narrative management campaigns are getting more and more frenzied."

"We see this exemplified in two recent smear pieces published by imperial spinmeisters about critics of the establishment-authorized narratives about what’s happening in China."

The oligarch-funded Axios has published a new article titled “The American blog pushing Xinjiang denialism” about the alternative media outlet The Grayzone.

Missing entirely from the article, conspicuously, is any argument or evidence that The Grayzone has ever published any false information. About Xinjiang, or about anything else.

Grayzone’s Ben Norton wrote this past June that “in its more than four years of existence, including its first two years hosted at the website AlterNet… The Grayzone has never had to issue a major correction or retract a story.”

All they’ve been able to do is argue that The Grayzone reports things that other media outlets do not report, which are not in alignment with the approved viewpoint of the United States government. Which is to say, all they can argue is that The Grayzone is doing journalism.

In fact, if you believe as I do that journalism’s first and foremost function is to hold your government to account with the light of truth, you can easily make the argument that The Grayzone has published more real journalism just this year than MSM have put out this millennium.

To say that this critical reporting shouldn’t be happening is to say that journalism shouldn’t be happening.

Not content with attacking small alternative media outlets, this one focuses on dishonestly smearing three individual Twitter users: @CarlZha, @Jerry_grey2002, and an Australia-based account with a few thousand followers called @Xi_Fan.

Coda’s editor-in-chief @Antelava, as noted by @DanielDumbrill, has blatantly lied about her outlet’s NED funding, tweeting just days ago that “we don’t take money from governments, oligarchs and tech platforms”.

In a healthy world, using dishonest manipulation to damage people’s reputations would cost a reporter their job. Instead, writers like Isobel Cockerel and Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian will be rewarded, elevated and offered many new opportunities for their willingness to twist truth

There are no words for the depravity of a news media institution which has been entrusted by the public to hold power to account and tell them the truth about what’s going on in the world, and instead abuses that trust by facilitating power and obfuscating the truth.