The American media landscape in this time of U.S. imperial decline is increasingly detached from reality. We’ve shifted from the War on Terror to a new cold war of great-power competition, where Russia, China, and their allies are constantly vilified. In this paradigm, both the right and the left have become frequent promoters of the propaganda that Washington’s regime change consent factory creates, though these two sides do their jobs from different angles.

Currently, the Trump White House is coordinating a right-wing media effort to blame China for Covid-19, which is a narrative that liberals and “progressives” are for now not typically trying to proliferate. But from their own angle, these left-leaning media figures have long been laying the groundwork for this trend of misinformation about China.

Democracy Now’s promotions of far-right and religious extremist propaganda about China

In earlier parts of America’s descent into late-stage imperial madness, there was more room in mainstream discourse for dissent. Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman covered the atrocities of the 1999 NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, and in 2006 Goodman wrote a book titled Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back. The book observed how “Bush had used deception and disinformation to get us into a war…Remarkable testimonials, compelling narratives-and all of them fake. These stories, which aired on American news programs, were each produced by the government. The ‘reporters’ were public relations professionals hired by the government.”

Despite having noted this trick that war propaganda operatives can use to get their messages into the media, in July of 2019 Goodman featured a similar type of dishonest “expert” on her program, an “expert” who proliferates narratives as false as the Iraq WMD claim. His name was Adrian Zenz, a far-right evangelical who’s a senior fellow at the U.S. government-created Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

It’s worth mentioning that the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation is an outgrowth of the National Captive Nations Committee, whose Ukrainian nationalist founder Lev Dobriansky also created the World Anti-Communist League. Journalist Joe Conason has described the League as a “haven for neo-Nazis, fascists, and anti-Semitic extremists from two dozen countries.” The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation itself continues to propagate the “double genocide” theory, which rewrites the Holocaust in order to portray the Soviet Union as an equivalent to the Nazis.

Aside from how it’s incredible that Goodman would even associate Democracy Now with a man who’s connected to this network of hate groups and Holocaust revisionists, the claims that Zenz made on the program lacked any core evidence. Zens said that China is “putting possibly a million or more of the Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities into so-called re-education camps,” and that this represents “the largest incarceration of a particular ethnic minority since the Holocaust.”

Zenz has based his “million or more” claim off of a report from Istiqlal TV, a Uyghur separatist television network that’s often hosted guests with links to Al Qaeda and other extremist groups. Istiqlal TV claimed in 2018 that Chinese authorities had “leaked” a figure of several hundred thousand Uyghur detainees. Zenz used this to speculate, based on no evidence, that over a million Uyghurs were potentially being held.

Democracy Now’s participation in the anti-Chinese media trend didn’t end there. In January of this year, Goodman interviewed Ai Weiwei, the former Chinese resident who’s frequently used his public platform to vilify China. Throughout his career, Weiwei has collaborated with the notorious neoconservative think tank the Council on Foreign Relations, which gives some indication of which geopolitical narratives he aims to advance.

On the program, Weiwei made the wild claim that China has detained “million, millions of Uyghurs.” Weiwei also called the anti-Chinese Hong Kong protests “a very beautiful revolution.” He said this after Hong Kong’s communities had reportedly come to live in fear of violence from the protesters, after some protesters had lit a man on fire and killed an elderly man with a brick, and after the protests had been endorsed by Ukrainian neo-Nazis.

The fact that Goodman hasn’t made any effort to emphasize the U.S. backing behind religious extremism in Xinjiang, or to expose the U.S. role in the Hong Kong protests, shows which side of the story Democracy Now has sought to tell when it comes to China.

The Intercept’s false claims about Xinjiang and repeated efforts to spin the narrative against China

In August 2018, The Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan published a story which claimed the U.N. had said that one million Uyghurs were being detained by China. It joined many other media outlets in reporting this falsehood, which was started by a Reuters article titled: “U.N. says it has credible reports that China holds million Uighurs in secret camps.”

This claim was false because the U.N. itself hadn’t decided to level such a charge against China, nor had they conducted any investigation into the issue. A group that the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination describes as “a body of independent experts” were the ones who’d come up with the charge and sent it to the U.N. as a report. And the only mention of China’s Uygher camps within the report came from the group’s American member Gay McDougall, who expressed concern about “credible reports” that China was interning millions of people. McDougall didn’t specify the sources for those reports.

This didn’t stop Hasan from continuing to push the Western media line that China is perpetrating a “cultural genocide” against Muslims with its Islamic extremism re-habilitation centers, even though China has numerous laws to protect racial and religious freedom and state-backed institutions exist in China which advance Islamic culture. In December 2019, Hasan even played a clip on his podcast of Mike Pompeo claiming that “China is home to one of the worst human rights crises of our time. It is truly the stain of the century.” Hasan didn’t challenge Pompeo’s statement, nor point out Pompeo’s glaring hypocrisy given that the U.S. has been facilitating gargantuan human rights crises in Gaza and Yemen. Hasan instead said that he thought the Trump administration isn’t being aggressive enough towards China.

A subtler but still insidious instance of anti-Chinese propaganda from The Intercept is when it published the cheery headline from last year: “What A Protest In Hong Kong Looks Like When Pro-Democracy Protesters Lose Their Fear Of The Police.” It started by saying that the Hong Kong protests had started after “the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre,” even though no evidence exists for this massacre having taken place. It then gave a vague overview about how the protesters are fighting for “democracy,” one that didn’t mention the U.S. involvement in the protests or the colonial chauvinist nature of the demonstrations.

The underlying message of this and most of The Intercept’s other coverage of China-related issues is that the Communist Party is the bad actor. No attempts have been made by the publication to expose Washington’s hybrid warfare operations against China, which would provide the context needed to dispute the Western propaganda claims that the Intercept has typically featured.

A larger pattern of progressive media complicity in imperialist narratives

I’ve focused on Democracy Now and The Intercept because they’re two of the most influential outlets within the modern left-leaning sphere. Their advancements of the major propaganda narratives about China from the last couple of years has left the American cold war perception management machine unchallenged within the mainstream. When people have been told from all sides that China is a menace, it’s easier to spread the idea that China has engineered a global pandemic.

The media figures I’ve mentioned, as well as others who represent the biggest facets of the left-leaning media, have reinforced war propaganda in additional areas. In April 2018, Hasan wrote an op-ed that claimed Bashar al-Assad had definitely committed a chemical attack that month, even though witness testimonies and inspections of the Douma site have since contradicted the core arguments behind this claim. Amy Goodman has also repeatedly promoted “Assad did it again” stories. These two figures parallel David Pakman, the “progressive” pundit who’s promoted Venezuela regime change propaganda; as well as Cenk Uygur, who’s opportunistically reinforced anti-Russian narratives.

Even The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, who’s stood up to recent media hysteria about Russia, has taken up many of the cold war stances on China. In a Twitter thread from this month, Greenwald repeated Adrian Zenz’ narrative about Xinjiang, as well as praised Bernie Sanders for promoting a claim about China supposedly having concealed information on Covid-19. Greenwald has since disputed the more hyperbolic claims about China being the culprit for the pandemic, but his apparent attempts to find balance on the issue have made him complicit in the march towards xenophobic war fever.

It’s impossible to find the exact intentions of Goodman, Hasan, Pakman, Greenwald, or any other figure who’s engaged in war propaganda. But it’s easy to see the biases within media institutions that encourage individuals to reinforce the official line. The Intercept is owned by the billionaire Pierre Omidyar, who’s not just fostered a friendly environment for biased reporters like Hasan but has had The Intercept team up with the war propaganda firm Bellingcat. Democracy Now’s host network PBS is funded by the U.S. government. Democracy Now’s other host network Free Speech TV also features Pakman’s program, showing that Free Speech TV doesn’t prioritize anti-imperialism despite seeking to differentiate itself from the corporate media. Uygur’s network TYT has received millions from a Clinton donor, contributing to its many ideological failings as a self-described “progressive” network.

We should apply a more critical eye to the outlets that call themselves “independent” or “outside of the corporate media.” The Epoch Times advertises itself as “independent,” and it’s associated with a far-right religious group that’s currently using its media organization to spread inflammatory misinformation about China being behind Covid-19. Whether or not an outlet is directly tied to the six corporations that control 90% of America’s media, it can serve the empire’s propaganda apparatus.

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