Well there it was. It came out of the Saturday Sydney Morning Herald and put me in a bad mood for my long October weekend, while I ate my breakfast. Ok, so alright, Beijing manipulates our media. In an ideal world I would call this complete nonsense, but the idealists jumped ship more than 20 years ago - many of us perhaps a good few years prior to that and so, quite frankly, as with so many times in the past, I choked on my corn flakes, when I read this strange synopsis of silliness.
I choked on my breakfast cerial yet again, while I read in the same Saturday Herald edition that in an era where people get news from more sources than they used previously, many of them read news which reinforced their own ideologies, rather than a more moderate voice. In other words people create their own digitally modified filter bubbles, in which they will live.
The increasing gap between the rich and poor, the post-pandemic meltdown of society and a rambunctious social media caused this polarisation. The article noted a decline in church attendance and trade union memberships. Compare this with the old days and a more trusted variety of moderate news sources and regular daily newspaper mastheads, including afternoon papers! None of it was online!
While George Orwell was ahead of his time when he predicted certain aspects of the future, his thought processes may not have been as sharp as the great British philosopher and writer Aldous Leonard Huxley. The National Book Review told readers they were living in his nightmare and not the scenario played out in Mr Orwell's 1984. It quoted Professor Huxley, when he said:
"the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance... [and this great philosopher] feared those who would give us so much [information], that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism..."
If China is manipulating the news silo, then people should not blame China, but rather those who created the rules of the game, which news organisations have played out in many of the years post-9/11.
The masters of the universe have regulated news media to favour what is clickable or swipeable for those who read their news digitally, mixed in with the daily dose of nonsense world leaders blurt out, in the desperate hope of reelection and whatever nonsense perverse purveyors of publicity spin to the journalists - a situation which gets more out of hand each year!
The USA's media is in better shape than elsewhere in the western world, because other western countries were not built on the grand ideals of state power and independent state news services. Entrepreneurs built their newspaper empires on the back of the awesome power of the great states, just as individual states exercised their strength before, during and after the American Civil War. Their news services were for the people, of the people and by the people.
The Saturday Herald informed readers that China bought satellite networks in developing regions.
It told readers that China spent millions of dollars annually to secure unlabelled Chinese government content, through distribution agreements, sponsored online influencers and social media operatives, who gave biased or false information, and increased foreign media investment, on a non-public and public basis.
The paper stated that China used trolls, bots, data harvesting and censorship to control the global media scene. It stated that the People's Republic of China "... suppress[ed] critical information that contradict[ed] its desired narratives..."
The US State Department believed China "...had created its own information ecosystem, by co-opting foreign political elites and journalists,..." it said.
China worked with Russia to pervert the message which went out to those who still read our newspapers, while we ate our corn flakes.
In all of this the people have forgotten how our society was in the old days, when we had strong local communities, when we had local groups, which held regular meetings up the road from where we lived and when we held moderate views about the world. We had moderate views, because our news services had an air of locality and state about them and the demands of clickable and swipeable electronic news services had not burdened readers so much, with national and international affairs and extreme views.
If we still lived by these grand ideals of locality and individual states, China would not have infiltrated the international media. To use those words from Aldous Leonard Huxley again: "the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance... [and we should fear] those who would give us so much [information], we would be reduced to passivity and egoism..." It is very clear that our society must take a step backwards to a time of respect for our local communities and states, if we are to move forward, lest we choke on our breakfast ― Joseph Walz