In a blistering assertion on Friday, the White Home laid into Voice of America (VOA), the taxpayer-funded information service, accusing them of utilizing federal funds to unfold Chinese language propaganda concerning the coronavirus pandemic.
“Voice of America is a worldwide information community funded by American taxpayers,” the assertion says. “It spends about $200 million every year on its mission to ‘inform America’s story’ and ‘current the insurance policies of the US clearly and successfully’ to folks across the globe. At the moment, nonetheless, VOA too typically speaks for America’s adversaries — not its residents.”
The assertion criticized VOA for a latest tweet through which the information service shared a video about China celebrating the top of the lockdown in Wuhan. Within the tweet, VOA praised Beijing’s response to the coronavirus as a “mannequin” that could possibly be replicated by different international locations.
“Even worse,” the White Home assertion stated, “whereas a lot of the U.S. media takes its lead from China, VOA went one step additional: It created graphics with Communist authorities statistics to check China’s Coronavirus demise toll to America’s. As intelligence consultants level out, there’s merely no technique to confirm the accuracy of China’s numbers.”
In an interview with the Washington Submit, VOA’s director Amanda Bennett stated she had no thought why the White Home was attacking the outlet.
“I’m afraid I can’t inform you what prompted it,” Bennett stated. “I don’t really know. It simply got here out of the blue. We now have by no means promoted propaganda for anybody. We cowl tales from all totally different sides. That’s a part of the explanation we’re so trusted by folks around the globe.”
As Bennett ought to effectively know, you don’t must actually reprint press releases from the Chinese language Communist Celebration to advertise their propaganda. Any information outlet that’s giving any credence in any respect to the statistics popping out of Wuhan and Beijing is doing so. It’s not fairly as absurd as taking Kim Jong Un’s phrase for it that there isn’t a coronavirus in North Korea…nevertheless it’s fairly shut. What number of occasions can China mislead the world earlier than information organizations begin treating them with a little bit of skepticism?
Ah, however see, propping up China’s response to the coronavirus lets these information shops focus their total fury on President Donald Trump and his administration’s response to the pandemic. And so they’ll overlook absolutely anything if it lets them get again to that mission.
