The American news media are doing a bang-up job of assisting China in its propaganda effort to position itself as the most reliable and competent superpower amid the COVID-19 pandemic that originated in China.
NBC News, for example, published an opinion article this weekend titled, “Coronavirus in China kept me under quarantine. I felt safer there than back in the U.S.”
The op-ed, by the way, is written by an American music professor who was in China recently on sabbatical. He is not a healthcare professional. He is not a crisis management expert. He is not even a government worker. He is just a guy who saw what he was allowed to see as a tourist in China.
Yet, for whatever reason, one of the largest and most powerful media groups in the United States has given him a platform to praise the government that caused this crisis and to criticize the U.S. based on his very limited experiences in a notoriously secretive and controlling one-party state.
The author writes:
In contrast, individual liberty is the engine that drives American exceptionalism. There are certainly valid questions about how much of it to sacrifice in the name of the public good, but our laissez-faire attitude, prioritization of personal freedom and utter lack of government leadership have left Americans confused and exposed.
There are lessons to be learned from the Chinese people if not its leadership, including that everybody must accept their own responsibility, vulnerability and complicity — sacrificing “rights” for the collective good — or many of us will die.
Absent from the article are mentions of China’s initial attempts to cover up the pandemic or the arrests of whistleblowers who tried to warn the international community about the outbreak.
The Chinese Communist Party could not hope for more help from the American news media.
The author of this op-ed is free to act as an enthusiastic and supportive cheerleader for the country with concentration camps, but what is NBC’s excuse for publishing his dreck? COVID-19 is a pandemic precisely because of China’s culture of secrecy and unaccountability. How do you publish an op-ed comparing and contrasting liberties in the U.S. and China without mentioning that China punished those who tried to speak out about the disease?
And this NBC op-ed is not a one-off for Western news media. This sort of thing has become par for the course for our supposedly free press, which has taken to criticizing U.S. incompetence while praising China’s supposed expertise and proficiency amid the COVID-19 outbreak.
MSNBC anchor Chuck Todd asked last weekend: “How uncomfortable is it, that perhaps China’s authoritarian ways did prevent this? Meaning, had China been a free and open society, this might have spread faster?” Every word of his statement was false.
And it was just last week that the New York Times published an op-ed with the headline, “China Bought the West Time. The West Squandered It.” Evidently, Walter Duranty is still on the beat.
