Jenna Chew: Congress seeks $500 Million for Negative News Manufacturing to demonize China… Fake News Industrial Complex?

Jenna Chew questions Uncle Sam’s ethics… “How Dare You”?

Congress Proposes $500 Million for Negative News Coverage of China

The effort to counter China’s ‘malign influence’ would fund negative coverage of China’s Belt and Road Initiative—while also beefing up the U.S.’s international lending.

Industrialized Media Demonization?

A tech and manufacturing bill currently moving through Congress allocates $500 million for media outlets to produce journalism for overseas audiences that is critical of China.
Meant to “combat Chinese disinformation,” the bill would direct funding to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, a U.S.-run foreign media service, as well as local outlets and programs to train foreign journalists.
The America COMPETES Act, just passed by the House, is an industrial policy plan for semiconductor production and supply chain resiliency. It sets aside technology investment funds for everything from high-level research to high school computer science.
If a domestic manufacturing bill seems like the wrong setting for spending on foreign news dispatches, sponsors say it’s a natural fit, since the need to stimulate American production is a matter of competition with Beijing. The sales pitch for reviving global competitiveness has been vivid: The country’s use of forced labor in Xinjiang camps, Nancy Pelosi said last week in a speech on the bill, “hurts American workers who have to compete with slave labor.”
The House version of the legislation, which passed last week, is a companion to the Senate’s more hawkish bill on China competition, USICA, which passed in June of last year. The plan is to merge both bills through a conference committee in the coming weeks.
The bills have titles penned by the Foreign Affairs Committees of each chamber. Both include a section named “Supporting independent media and countering disinformation.”
While both bills stipulate that the U.S.-funded media coverage should be “independent,” that mandate could be at odds with other requirements in the legislation. There is, at the very least, an appearance of conflict. For example, the Senate bill aims to crowd out Chinese investment in developing countries, and also encourages criticism of China’s projects in those markets.
Critics of escalating tensions with Beijing expressed concerns over the push for anti-China coverage, saying it could potentially undermine the credibility of journalists involved in the reporting.
“We welcome support for journalism,” Tobita Chow, the director of Justice Is Global, a group that advocates for a more equitable world economy, told the Prospect. “But if the government is setting out ahead of time in legislation what the conclusion and the point of coverage is going to be, that doesn’t really qualify as genuine journalism.”
Editorially Independent State-Funded News
The Senate bill aims to produce more anti-China media for regions where it says the Chinese Communist Party and other rivals are promoting “manipulated media markets.” It notes that the sponsored news will be “independent.”
Governments have long funded (relatively) impartial programming, from PBS’s educational shows for children to the titanic British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). But the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which would receive the majority of the media support in this bill package, has a troubled legacy.
A federally funded government agency, USAGM oversees outlets including Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia (RFA), and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB). The outlets have sometimes blurred the line between objective news coverage and pro-American propaganda — a distinction that all but dissolved in the Trump years.
After the OCB came under fire for airing a 2018 segment calling the philanthropist George Soros “a nonbelieving Jew of flexible morals,” it conducted an internal review that offers a candid look at U.S.-run foreign media’s mission.
“A primordial rule of successful political messaging and modern marketing is that to influence people, you must usually first establish empathy with them,” the report explains. “OCB’s broadcasts and postings do that far too little. They seek instead to activate overt opposition and hostility to the entirety of the Cuban Revolution.” Instead, the report recommends a subtler approach that could more effectively sway Cuban public opinion… More