More from the article above. Western media is bad for your mental health.
A common argument was that there must be a genocide in China, because why else would the Chinese refuse to allow anyone to enter the area? The western media followed the CIA-founded Radio Free Asia’s line in presenting Xinjiang as a giant prison, a locked-off place where people can’t enter. This was the opposite of the truth. More than 150 million tourists visit the region every year, mostly domestic visitors but with some foreigners, making it one of the world’s top tourist spots by number. Many stay in Uyghur-run hotels and make a point of eating Uyghur foods.
Worryingly, there were clearly cases in which the western media did not just report a false narrative, but seemed to actively enable the deception of their own audiences. Abrams noted how an image showing the details of Tursunay Ziawudun’s passport created a problem for the new narrative she was pushing. Instead of investigating this crucial discrepancy, CNN reporters covered it up by blurring the key part of the image.
Abrams’ book also notes the real story behind the image of a large group of men used by the Guardian and almost every other media outlet to present Uyghur concentration camp victims. But, as this writer pointed out two years ago, it really shows a 2017 group of people in a rehabilitation center gathering to listen to a Muslim speaker.
Serial deceiver rewarded
What about all those pictures on Twitter of Uyghurs being horrible harmed or mistreated? To find an answer to that, consider the case of the notorious Arslan Hidayat. This Australia-based individual’s standard technique was to take pictures of people in misery from anywhere he could find them and then re-label them as Uyghurs being tortured by Chinese, for mass diffusion on the internet. When confronted, he would admit that this type of falsification was common among activists such as himself—and then do the same trick again.
You would think that such a person would immediately have sacrificed all credibility. The opposite is true: he was quoted as a legitimate source by the BBC, the Guardian, CNN, AFP, Al-Jazeera, TRT WORLD, and numerous others. Today he has been rewarded for his skills in deception by being given a salaried position at Campaign for Uyghurs, one of many, er, “independent” anti-China propaganda groups.
Moral compass? What moral compass? Dear reader, keep turning the pages. It gets worse.