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.
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?
