Richard Cullen on White Man’s Media: Anxious and Aggressive (Pearls and Irritations)

This is one of a number of  articles in a series on White Man’s Media which is running at Pearls & Irritations. Articles in the series can be found here.

White Man’s Media: anxious and aggressive

by

Richard Cullen

Published at Pearls and Irritations in Australia

It is useful to recall how so much Western media coverage, from Hong Kong, of the deeply intimidating, three-month shut-down of arterial roads in 2014 and the unremitting violence of the 2019 multi-month insurrection was, in each case, dominated, first, by a constant retelling of narratives supplied by the activists and secondly, by intense coverage of all perceived lapses in official and police reactions. Added to this was a steady degree of media support for the protestors – regularly spilling over into acclamation – regardless, typically, of the unfolding disruption, chaos and destruction.

     It is inconceivable that coverage by the mainstream media in the US or UK, or elsewhere in the West, would have been remotely this tilted had these events unfolded on their own doorstep, rather than on China’s doorstep.

    Next, imagine, today, a leader in the New York Times (NYT) accurately observing that:

America’s appalling response to the COVID pandemic has cost the US trillions of dollars and thousands of preventable deaths. If only we had looked to and learned from China.

You certainly have to imagine this for it will never appear. In fact, the NYT has recently moved from repeatedly dismissing the Wuhan lab-leak conspiracy theory as fevered blame-averting by the Trump administration to arguing robustly that this is now a matter in need of serious revisiting.

     Why, though, has this remarkable U-turn materialized? A pivotal aspect of the explanation is that history and current polling indicate that the Biden Democrats face a serious risk of losing their slim majorities in either the House of Representatives or the Senate – or both – in the mid-term elections due in November, 2022. Now that Trump is gone, the far-reaching anti-Trump media machine can get seriously behind Joe Biden. Re-energizing the (once derided) Wuhan lab-leak conspiracy theory provides an opportune argument, blessed with significant Sino-phobic potential to spur Democrat voter turnout and support in 2022... Click here to read the full article.