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Im-Politic: Home Delivery for Chinese Propaganda

30 Wednesday Jan 2019

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Im-Politic

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"Democracy Dies in Darkness", BBC, China, China Daily, ChinaWatch, fake news, Im-Politic, journalism, Mainstream Media, propaganda, RT America, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post

For all the attention that’s been focused lately on the mainstream media’s objectivity and credibility, there’s no doubt that some major newspapers have for years been foisting unmistakably fake news on their readers, and I just got a reminder when I went out to my front porch this morning to pick up my Washington Post. It comes in the form of the ChinaWatch supplement (see here, e.g.) that arrives stuck inside the print edition periodically.

My main problem with ChinaWatch – which also has deals with other leading publications, including The Wall Street Journal – isn’t that it’s issued by the Chinese government, and therefore is nothing more than Beijing propaganda. Any country valuing free expression should welcome all comers to its media markets and national debates.

Instead, my main problem with ChinaWatch is that there’s no way for anyone lacking considerable knowledge about China and its state-run media to know that ChinaWatch is a Chinese government product.

Near the top of the front page, readers can see that the ChinaWatch supplement is “prepared by China Daily, People’s Republic of China” and “did not involve the news or editorial departments of the Washington Post.” At the very bottom comes the statement, “ChinaWatch materials are distributed by China Daily Distribution Corp., on behalf of China Daily, Beijing, China. Additional information is on file with the Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.”

But why should that raise any red flags (no pun intended) with non-specialists? After all, the Post and most other news organizations routinely report that the Chinese economy is full of “private companies.” (See, e.g., here.) Why not simply assume that China Daily Distribution Corp. is simply one of them? It certainly sounds like a typical American-style business. And although the Justice Department reference might look a little odd, how many readers of American newspapers recognize it as a sign that the “company” is required under U.S. law to register as a foreign agent (though not necessarily as a foreign government)?

On page two you’ll find the masthead, with contact information for ChinaWatch‘s offices in China and various foreign locations. But no hint of any Chinese government affiliation appears here, either.

But there’s an easy fix for this problem: Require ChinaWatch to mention prominently on the front page (at least) that it’s a Chinese government publication. And because ChinaWatch is hardly the only foreign government product to appear in American news media outlets, the same should go for the United Kingdom’s BBC, Russia’s RT America, and others. As those two are among the foreign government media organizations that mainly broadcast, their identification could come in the form of text that continually appears in the “crawls” that so many televised news programs run at the bottom of the screen, or, in the case of radio, as periodic announcements (say, every five minutes).

And finally, in the interests of full disclosure, although ChinaWatch specifies that its content has nothing to do with the news and editorial departments of papers like the Washington Post, its appearance has lots to do with the business departments of those newspapers, and their bottom lines. For ChinaWatch is paid advertising. So the Post and the Journal and any others should make clear on a regular basis that they depend in part on the Chinese government for revenue.

After all, as the Post declares ominously in its new, Trump-era advertising slogan, “Democracy dies in darkness.” That’s also the place where reader ignorance and conflicts of interest flourish.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: So You Think Trump is a Dangerous Nut on North Korea?

21 Thursday Sep 2017

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Our So-Called Foreign Policy

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Alex Ward, alliances, allies, Ana Fifield, Ankit Panda, Associated Press, BBC, CNN, Cold War, Council on Foreign Relations, David J. Rothkopf, David Jackson, deterrence, Diane Feinstein, Ed Markey, foreign policy, foreign policy establishment, Kim Jong Un, media, Nicole Gaouette, North Korea, nuclear weapons, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Peter Baker, political class, Rick Gladstone, Stewart Patrick, The Atlantic, The Diplomat, The New York Times, Trump, United Nations, USAToday, Vox.com, Washington Post

Weird as it sounds, the North Korea nuclear crisis has created two significant benefits – though unfortunately neither has yet created either establishment or popular pressure to change an increasingly reckless American approach.

Still, it’s promising that dictator Kim Jong Un’s rapid development of nuclear weapons that can reach the U.S. homeland is not only revealing that America’s longstanding approach to defense alliances is now exposing the nation to the risk of nuclear attack even when its own security is not directly at stake. It’s also more recently begun exposing America’s many foreign policy and other elite mainstays either as ignoramuses or (much more likely) shameful hypocrites.

The reason? They profess to be shocked, just shocked (Google “Casablanca” and “Louis Renault”) that President Trump has threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea in order “to defend itself or its allies.” As if they’ve never heard of “nuclear deterrence.” And don’t know that such saber-rattling has been U.S. policy for decades.

To review briefly, since fairly early in the Cold War, and especially since the former Soviet Union developed its own impressive nuclear forces, American leaders have overwhelmingly concluded that the only reasonable uses of these weapons was preventing a nuclear attack on the United States itself, or a similar strike or conventional military assault on one of the countries it was treaty-bound to protect. The idea was that even nuclear-armed potential aggressors the Soviets and Chinese (and the North Koreans, once they crossed the threshhold) would think at least twice before moving on targets if they had reason to fear that the United States would launch its own nukes against those countries.

From time to time, some politicians and analysts suggested that the effects of such nuclear weapons use could be restricted to efforts to take out the enemy’s remaining nuclear weapons or otherwise fall short of “totally destroying” that adversary. But for the most part, the idea of limited nuclear war has been rejected in favor of vowing annihilation. And except for disarmament types on the Left and super-hawks on the Right (who supported the aforementioned “counterforce” approach), the political class comprised of office-holders and journalists and think tankers was just fine with the nuclear element of U.S. alliance strategy.

It’s completely bizarre, therefore, that almost none of the press coverage – including “experts'” analyses – of Mr. Trump’s September 19 statement evinces any awareness of any of this history. Instead, it’s portrayed the “totally destroy” threat as appallingly monstrous, unhinged rhetoric from an unprecedentedly erratic chief executive. Just as bad, President Trump is accused of playing right into Kim’s hands and shoring up his support with the North Korean populace.

For instance, here’s how Washington Post reporter Ana Fifield yesterday described the consensus of of North Korea specialists she had just surveyed:

“Kim Jong Un’s regime tells the North Korean people every day that the United States wants to destroy them and their country. Now, they will hear it from another source: the president of the United States himself.

“In his maiden address to the United Nations on Tuesday, President Trump threatened to “totally destroy North Korea.” Analysts noted that he did not even differentiate between the Kim regime, as President George W. Bush did with his infamous “axis of evil” speech, and the 25 million people of North Korea.”

Here’s the New York Times‘ take, from chief White House correspondent Peter Baker and foreign policy reporter Rick Gladstone:

“President Trump brought the same confrontational style of leadership he has used at home to the world’s most prominent stage on Tuesday as he vowed to ‘totally destroy North Korea‘ if it threatened the United States….”

Similarly, USAToday‘s David Jackson described the Trump speech as “a stark address to the United Nations that raised the specter of nuclear warfare” and contended that “Trump’s choice of words on North Korea is in keeping with the bellicose rhetoric he’s already used to describe the tensions that have escalated throughout his eight months in office.”

As for the Associated Press, the world’s most important news wire service, it was content to offer readers a stunning dose of moral equivalence: “In a region well used to Pyongyang’s pursuit of nuclear weapons generating a seemingly never-ending cycle of threats and counter-threats, Mr. Trump’s comments stood out.“

CNN‘s approach? It quoted a “senior UN diplomat” as claiming that “it was the first time in his memory that a world leader has called for the obliteration of another state at the UNGA [United Nations General Assembly], noting even Iran’s most fiery leaders didn’t similarly threaten Israel.”

For good measure, reporter Nicole Gaouette added, “The threat is likely to ratchet up tensions with North Korea while doing little to reassure US allies in Asia, said analysts who added that the President now also runs the risk of appearing weak if he doesn’t follow through.”

The Council on Foreign Relations’ Stewart Patrick, who served on the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff under former President George W. Bush, told the BBC that the Trump threat is implausible, and that “I think the folks in the Pentagon when they look at military options are just aghast at the potential loss of life that could occur with at a minimum hundreds of thousands of South Koreans killed in Seoul.”

For David J. Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official and protege of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger who went on to edit FOREIGNPOLICY magazine (where I worked many years before), the problem is much simpler: “The president of the United States chose, in a forum dedicated to diplomacy, to threaten to wipe another nation — a much smaller one — off the face of the earth in language that was not so much hard-line rhetoric as it was schoolboy bullying complete with childish name-calling.”

Many members of the U.S. Congress were no better. Said California Democratic Senator Diane Feinstein: “Trump’s bombastic threat to destroy North Korea and his refusal to present any positive pathways forward on the many global challenges we face are severe disappointments. He aims to unify the world through tactics of intimidation, but in reality he only further isolates the United States.”

Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ed Markey brought up a war powers angle: “The more the president talks about the total destruction of North Korea, the more it’s necessary for the country and the Congress to have a debate over what the authority of a president is to launch nuclear weapons against another country.”

What’s of course especially ironic about Markey’s words is that such a U.S. policy of “no first use” of nuclear weapons would effectively destroy the American alliances that liberals like Markey have become enamored with lately, and that President Trump is often charged by these same liberals as attempting to dismantle.

Some other news organizations and websites have behaved even more strangely – lambasting the Trump threat but then acknowledging deep inside their accounts that the President said nothing fundamentally new.

For example, the viscerally anti-Trump Vox.com website predictably led off one of its accounts with, “On September 19, President Donald Trump gave his first speech to the United Nations General Assembly. His harsh rhetoric toward North Korea stood out — mostly because he threatened to obliterate the country of 25.4 million people.”

Six paragraphs later, writer Alex Ward got around to mentioning that “A few [specialists] noted that it was similar to what other presidents, including President Obama, have said before.”

And in an Atlantic post titled, “A Presidential Misunderstanding of Deterrence,” author Ankit Panda of The Diplomat newspaper accused President Trump of using “apocalyptic rhetoric” and threatening “to commit a horrific act expressly forbidden by international humanitarian law….”

But then he immediately turned around and admitted,

“The remarks echoed similar, countless deterrent threats levied against North Korea by past U.S. presidents with more subtlety and innuendo, perhaps allowing for a more calibrated and flexible response. But ultimately vowing to ‘totally destroy’ North Korea if America or its allies come under attack is, in fact, not all that sharp a break from existing U.S. policy.”

If these treatments of the North Korea crisis were simply efforts to demonize President Trump by abusing history, that would be contemptible enough, but what else is new from America’s too often incompetent and scapegoat-addicted elites?

But something much more dangerous is at work here. Individuals who, for good reasons, have not been regarded as kooks are using Never Trump-ism to foster a genuinely kooky idea. They’re suggesting that the alliances so central to America’s foreign policy making for decades should be viewed as little more than kumbaya symbols, and that anyone speaking frankly about their possibly deadly and indeed horrific implications is beyond the pale – even though the proliferation of nuclear weapons has unmistakably rendered these arrangements far more perilous.

In other words, they’re spreading the worst, and most childish, of all canards about foreign policy, or about any dimension of public policy – not that a particular set of choices is sound or not (that’s almost always legitimately debatable), but that hard choices never need to be made at all.

Making News: Interviewed on BBC, Quoted on Forbes.com

15 Monday May 2017

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Making News

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

BBC, China, Forbes.com, Gordon G. Chang, Making News, Trade, Trump

I’m pleased to announce that the link to my interview with the BBC yesterday is now on-line.  Click here for a preview of some of this week’s biggest business news.  My segment starts at about the 11:40 mark.  And yes – I was mis-identified!  Hopefully that won’t happen again.

Also, Gordon G. Chang, who co-hosts most of the John Batchelor radio show segments on which I appear, cited my views on President Trump’s China trade deal in his latest column for Forbes.com.  Here’s the link.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

Making News: Newsmax TV Interview on China’s Threat to Boeing…& More!

12 Friday May 2017

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Uncategorized

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aerospace, BBC, Boeing, China, Lifezette.com, Making News, Newsmax TV, Ozy.com, ports

I’m pleased to announce that an interview I did this afternoon on Newsmax TV has just gone on-line. The subject: my Lifezette.com article Tuesday on how China’s new domestically produced commercial jet could become a major threat to America’s Boeing and to the nation’s longstanding aerospace predominance.  Click on this link to watch.

Also, it was great to be quoted yesterday in this Ozy.com article on how President Trump’s trade policies could affect the ports in the southeast part of the country.

Finally, I’ve got an interview coming up Sunday with the BBC on China’s “One Belt One Road” initiative, which many observers fear (or hope?) will make the People’s Republic the globe’s economic leader in the twenty first century. Check in with RealityChek for the details on broadcast time, and for news of other upcoming media appearances and other developments.

Making News: Coming Up Real Soon on National Radio on China Summit; New BBC Podcast On-Line

06 Thursday Apr 2017

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Making News

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BBC, China, Laura Ingraham, Making News, Trump, XiJinping

I’m pleased to announce that I am scheduled to appear on Laura Ingraham’s nationally syndicated radio show this morning at 9:35 EST to preview President Trump’s upcoming summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.  Click on this link to listen live on-line to what’s sure to be an insightful segment about the president’s first foray into face-to-face diplomacy with one of America’s leading global rivals. And as usual, I’ll post a link to the podcast as soon as one’s available.

Also, a podcast is now up of segment I did late yesterday afternoon on BBC radio on the same subject.  Here’s the link.

Keep checking in with RealityChek for news of media appearances and other developments.

Making News: More Press Hits Plus a Bubble Warning from 2004

19 Saturday Dec 2015

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Making News

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BBC, bubble, bubble decade, Dayton Daily News, debt, Mainstream Media, Making News, manufacturing, manufacturing trade deficit, Manufacturing.Net, Paul Solman, PBS, Trade, Trade Deficits, World Trade Organization, WTO

I’m pleased to report a few more media appearances – along with the (re)discovery of a speech I gave more than ten years ago that warned that the U.S. economy was becoming dangerously bubble-ized. Nearly as striking as my predictions were the reactions of the Mainstream Media moderator of the event.

But first the press hits. I just saw that my latest finding of a new monthly record American manufacturing trade deficit was picked up November 5 by the Manufacturing.Net news site. Here’s the link.

On Monday, December 14, I was interviewed by the BBC on the round of World Trade Organization talks that took place in Nairobi, Kenya last week. The resulting segment isn’t in easily linked form, but if you send me a request, I can email you a short podcast featuring the perspective I offered.

And yesterday, a Dayton Daily News piece on manufacturing in Ohio featured some information I provided exclusively to the reporter. Click here to read it.

As for that speech, you can see the video at this link. It shows that I was fretting about the American economy’s dangerous over-reliance on debt-led growth as early as March, 2004, and also presents an early version of my argument that Washington’s offshoring-focused trade policies were at the heart of the problem.

But also fascinating is the skepticism of PBS’ Paul Solman. He couldn’t imagine for the life of him why Americans spending much more than they earned could lead to anything but the best of all possible worlds – and that whatever comeuppance the nation would receive would be eminently bearable. And that wasn’t the only one of his howlers by any means!

And don’t despair! Even though the entire video is nearly an hour and a half long, the first half hour or so contains most of the highlights.

Making News: Podcast of New BBC Interview on China and Global Markets

24 Monday Aug 2015

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Making News

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BBC, China, China stock markets, currency, currency wars, devaluation, emerging markets, export-led growth, Federal Reserve, finance, interest rates, investing, Making News, monetary policy, recovery, Trade, Wall Street, yuan, ZIRP

I’m pleased to announce that I was interviewed on the BBC this morning on China’s economic and financial turmoil, and how it’s been shaking the world’s economy and financial markets.  Click on this link for the podcast.  My segment is titled “Global Markets React to China’s ‘Black Friday'” and yours truly comes in at about the 7 minute-50-seconds mark.

Moreover, even as we speak, I’m working on a more detailed analysis that I hope to post shortly.  Stay tuned!

Making News: BBC, Connecticut radio, and Reuters Global Markets Forum

12 Wednesday Nov 2014

Posted by Alan Tonelson in Making News

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APEC, BBC, China, Making News, Obama, Reuters Global Markets Forum, Trade, WATR-AM

Thanks to the interest in President Obama’s trip to China for a region-wide economic summit, and bilateral meetings with the leaders of China and other countries, it’s been a busy media week for me so far.

Earlier today, I taped a radio interview on U.S.-China trade relations with the BBC.  You can listen here.  Of special interest, the other guest on the  the show, Siva Yam of the Chicago-based USA-China Commerce of Commerce, wound up parroting just about every outdated myth still being spread about the nature of commerce between the two countries.  What you’ll hear is about 10 minutes worth of excerpts from a 25-minute taping.

Also, I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be back on WATR-AM (Waterbury, Connecticut) radio tomorrow at 11:10 AM EST talking about the results of the President’s trip.  You can listen live here.

Finally, I’m just as pleased to announce a return appearance at Reuters Global Markets Forum tomorrow as well.  Join us at 2 PM EST for a half-hour chat session on the Asia trip and America’s broader strategy toward the region here.  But please give yourself a few minutes to sign in!

 

 

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Current Thoughts on Trade

Terence P. Stewart

Protecting U.S. Workers

Marc to Market

So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

Alastair Winter

Chief Economist at Daniel Stewart & Co - Trying to make sense of Global Markets, Macroeconomics & Politics

Smaulgld

Real Estate + Economics + Gold + Silver

Reclaim the American Dream

So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

Mickey Kaus

Kausfiles

David Stockman's Contra Corner

Washington Decoded

So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

Upon Closer inspection

Keep America At Work

Sober Look

So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

Credit Writedowns

Finance, Economics and Markets

GubbmintCheese

So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

VoxEU.org: Recent Articles

So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

Michael Pettis' CHINA FINANCIAL MARKETS

New Economic Populist

So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

George Magnus

So Much Nonsense Out There, So Little Time....

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