CITIZENS OF THE WORLD: YOUR MEDIA IS LYING TO YOU

International media coverage of the Hong Kong protests is wildly distorted, independent data researchers say.

And the result? As I write this, guerrilla groups of vandals, financed by the US (evidence below), have shut down the metro train station and the buses.  My wife and children are on the phone, unable to get to where they need to be.

A crowd of blameless Hong Kong people are stranded at the nearby bus stop, some tearful with frustration. Children are trapped on public buses: they can’t get to school and they can’t get home.

And the Western media? They have already started applauding.

SOMETHING BAD IS HAPPENING

The truth: Coverage of Hong Kong is motivated by anti-Chinese sentiment, in both right-leaning outlets like Fox News and left-leaning outlets like the New York Times, the findings from a UK group clearly show.

The result is the chaos and misery I see all around me this morning. Many of my co-workers have crucial deadlines to meet: all our livelihoods are at risk.

Who’s at fault? Skewed media coverage has been encouraging violent radicals and hobbling attempts to deal with them. Hong Kong’s careful, non-lethal ways of trying to stop the violence has received unprecedented amounts of negative coverage from Western journalists—while the documented brutal killing of hundreds of protesters all over the world has received little or no coverage or at all.

SOME NUMBERS

An October 25 search for “Hong Kong protests” over a single month produced 282 responses in the New York Times—but “Chile protests” produced just 20, reported Alan MacLeod of the Glasgow University Media Group.

“The unequal coverage is even more pronounced on Fox News, where there were 70 results for Hong Kong over the same period and four, two and three for Chile, Ecuador and Haiti respectively,” he wrote in a summary of his findings for Salon.

The huge discrepancy cannot be explained away by “news value”. Hong Kong protests have produced no direct killings, no army call-out, no coups or martial law—while other anti-government protests have been far more brutal, with hundreds of deaths in Iraq alone.

TERRIFIED RESEARCHER

“Western journalists are guilty of gross dereliction of duty,” says one Hong Kong university researcher who will not give her name because of the very real danger of her office being smashed up—an incident that she believes no Western reporter would cover.

“What are all those people at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club doing?” she asks. “Will not one reporter tell the truth about Hong Kong?”

So far, she’s right. The real story, which no Western reporter will touch, is that “the Hong Kong has won the war to maintain stability,” says Tom Guendert, a Hong Kong based commentator. “The Hong Kong dollar has not been devalued, and Kyle Bass’s campaign to scare institutional investors has failed.” Importantly, “direct police action casualties have been avoided.”

Why will no one print that?

MISLEADING THE WORLD

Looking at the hard data, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that foreign correspondents are grossly misleading the global public.

The Western media continuously conflates the violent radicals demanding to “liberate Hong Kong from China” with the actual majority residents of Hong Kong, who in truth want the exact opposite: they don’t want independence from mainland China, but want a positive relationship.

The media also conflates the Hong Kong civil service with Beijing, and Hong Kong’s imperfect but generally non-corrupt police force with China’s very different PLA.

PROOF OF FUNDING

Western news outlets automatically pour scorn on suggestions that the protesters receive funding from the United States—despite the fact that an internet search taking literally 0.02 seconds will give any interested party the truth.

US$22 million has been sent to unnamed persons for efforts to promote Western-style democracy in mainland China and Hong Kong since 2014 by the National Endowment for Democracy, as MacLeod points out.

A significant portion has gone to unnamed activists in Hong Kong: it’s right there in print to anyone who can use Google—and is honest enough to tell the truth.

BLATANT BIAS

The media bias is often stunning. The UK Guardian labels self-described pro-democracy campaigners in Ecuador as “rioters” but avoids using that word to describe Hong Kong protesters who are clearly and unmistakably filmed in the act of rioting.

Why such gross distortion?

China is seen as the enemy of the West, so anyone fighting China is painted as a hero—even when what they are really doing is firebombing the offices of Hong Kong civil servants, a gentle, largely female group of milky-tea drinkers who are often more British than the British.

WHO ARE THE VICTIMS?

The result is that the self-labelled “silent majority”, which includes a significant section of the Hong Kong public, plus the civil service, the police and so on, may actually be the real victims – but the Western media won’t cover that angle as it doesn’t fit the anti-China narrative.

“They will show far less enthusiasm for a story when the ‘wrong’ people are the villains or the victims,” says MacLeod.

“The New York Times even invented the phrase ‘aggressive nonviolence’ to describe the Hong Kong protesters’ actions, so eager was it to frame the demonstrations against China as unquestionably laudable.”

MARCH THAT NEVER WAS

A particularly egregious example is the infamous “two million people” march in Hong Kong in June.

Scientists say it never happened. All the scientific ways of measuring crowd-flow show that hundreds of thousands of people marched, but not one million, let alone two. And any reporter with an ounce of self-respect knows that “organizers’ claims” are pure fantasy.

Yet Western reporters silence their fact-checkers to present fantastic claims as fact. Why? I know some of these people. They’re not evil. They’re just extremely eager to believe the worst against people they've decided are bad guys and the best of any group which opposes them, even if some members are bigoted vandals throwing firebombs.

TRUTH CAMPAIGN

If the international media has abandoned the Hong Kong people, how can we get the real story out?

There have been lots of ideas, such as letter-writing campaigns to newspapers, or the patient countering of propaganda with real facts.

It’s difficult. As this writer has found out, any attempt to give a more nuanced picture of what’s happening in Hong Kong leads to multiple accusations of being a “paid CCP stooge”.

KEEP THE FAITH

But we mustn’t give up. I got up early and got to work before the protesters barricaded the roads.

I’ve just heard on the phone that some co-workers at the publishing company I’m working at this morning are going to walk the whole route.

Some local residents are going to meet and dismantle the barricades, especially ones trapping school buses.

That’s the local spirit. We need to stay strong. Keep smiling. If people place obstacles in our way, metaphorically or literally, we'll patiently move them. Anyone who bets against the people of Hong Kong will lose.

Peace.

From Nury Vittachi, who works at Poly University.