this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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๐ Then ๐ read ๐ the ๐ Wiki ๐ page ๐
Because that will tell you the answer is 1. One zero. Because the number of dead civilians in the Tiananmen Square Massacre is zero. No civilian deaths there. Nada. Read the wiki page, it will tell you no deaths. This information brought to you by such Commies as:
Were there a limited number of deaths in protests elsewhere that wasn't Tiananmen? Yep, about 2-3 hundred across a few hundred cities. And that's bad! But is also pretty dang small relative to the protest size, and happens in all major protests in all countries everywhere.
This is and has always been a red herring. It's irrelevant if people were killed in the square or in the streets around the square. People were killed in Beijing by the Chinese military in order to suppress the protests. End of story.
Well, A massive, purposeful, misinformation campaign by the western governments and news sites that had claimed that there were no deaths in the square in the past and then changed their narrative all of a sudden, would, to me, suggest that these entities might also be misreprenting or lying about the other events. The story obviously does not end there.
Yes, Western media can definitely not be trusted. Better to get the real story from the secretive, authoritarian government that heavily suppresses speech and directly controls its major media outlets.
Dang I hate secretive governments, can you direct me to a western government that exposes all of its internal communications and doesn't have a huge amount of "former" state agents in major media publications?
edit: folks, I have had my weekend water on a Monday
You're right, there isn't a single Western country that has a freer press than China. In fact, China may be the world's last bastion of open information and free speech.
Except China doesn't squeal about how free their press is all the time- that's America and the west at large, all of whose media is owned by wealthy people.
There were some Western news outlets that lied about the events and propagated false information, and there were some that that did not.
The fact that Western media outlets cannot be blindly trusted does not mean that the Chinese state controlled media can. The Chinese state has a lot more incentive to lie about the events than independent news orgs do.
You should read Manufacturing Consent.
I have and I think that there is validity to the propoganda model.
But the propoganda model does not say that all reporting by Western media is false, only that Western media has a hidden bias. But while Western media has an underlying bias to shape a narrative that fits the interests of the wealthy, Chinese state media has an overt and explicit bias to push the narrative in a direction that fits the interests of the state.
So why would I be more skeptical of western reporting on the incident?
you really think their bias is in your favor?