Contagious Illusions
Western media’s credibility vanishes with busted fake news in pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has been rapidly spreading globally, causing tremendous loss. But what is spreading more easily and faster is fake news, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at the Munich Security Conference in February.
The fake news, together with the virus, further hurt the public. Some Western media favor rumors against China, such as baseless allegations of covering up the outbreak and the conspiracy theory the virus was created in lab.
Once fake news is busted by science, the Western media’s halo of “professionalism” and “objectivity” vanishes.
He Hui, a professor at School of International Journalism and Communication under Beijing Foreign Studies University, told the Global Times that the attack with rumors from Western media reminds him of the “black propaganda” at war time.
Lü Xiang, a research fellow on US studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, said that these rumors with strong political connotation show the inside arrogance of the Western countries which believe that their political system is “better than China’s.”
What is relieving is that such situation has only occurred in politics and the media currently. Scientists around the world are still keeping their conscience, Lü said.
Hyping rumors
Australian media the Daily Telegraph published an exclusive report on its front page on May 2, saying that its journalist Sharri Markson obtained a 15-page research document from the Five Eyes intelligence agencies, which revealed the novel coronavirus may have “originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
This report was widely quoted by international media and Markson was even invited to “reveal the truth” on Fox News. However, intelligence agencies of the US and Australia quickly denied the existence of that document.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported on May 4 that senior officials in Australia’s intelligence community said most of the material in the Daily Telegraph’s so-called secret dossier was based on news reports and without any intelligence information.
Since the outbreak of COVID-19 in China, some Western media have been in a state of excitement, but there is certain regularity in their focus. Lü shared his analysis the “attitude” of some Western media in the past four months with the Global Times on Saturday.
“From the appearance of the virus to the lockdown of Wuhan, some Western media hyped the outbreak the same as SARS in 2003. Some Western media previously hyped SARS as a political virus. An American media even said that the SARS virus was ‘the scourge of God to China’s political system.’ In the early days of the outbreak of COVID-19, they repeated the same lie,” he said.
The second stage was the lockdown of Wuhan, which was described by some Western media as a “cruel and hurtful way to harm human rights,” he said.
“What impressed me most was an interview with Fox News on January 30 in which Wilbur Ross, US commerce secretary, said that the novel coronavirus epidemic in China would help speed up the return of manufacturing to the US,” Lü told the Global Times.
Lü said that in February when the epidemic developed in China, the Western media stayed out of the event. “US politicians and media even found they could benefit from it.”
But when Europe and the US entered emergency in late March, voices proliferated claiming “China has not been transparent at all by hiding the number of infections and deaths, which led to the spread of the virus globally.”
“On March 30, a friend in France suddenly told me that French TV and newspapers are all
talking about ‘China covering up the death toll.’ Then I checked to find that the infection number in France was about to surpass that of China in those days,” said Lü.
In fact, according to the WHO on April 8, as early as on December 31, 2019, China informed the WHO that an unknown pneumonia occurred in Wuhan. Since January 3, China has been actively reporting epidemic information to the WHO, the US and other countries and regions regularly.
China published information of the epidemic domestically and to other countries, and conducted the strictest prevention measures in the shortest amount of time, winning time for other regions in the world to prepare for the pandemic.
“Talking about the origin of the virus, at the beginning Western media said it was artificial, then leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or the Wuhan seafood market… whatever they said, they only have one opinion: ‘the virus has definitely originated from China,’” said Lü.
The origin of a virus is not the fault of some countries. But saying it “must be from China” shows a strong political agenda, which we could not stand, he said.
Scientists’ conscience
According to He Hui, some media spread rumors under the Trump administrations’ influence. Meanwhile, the lack of reliable and authoritative information leads to the production of fake news – Western media advertise freedom of speech and diversity, but there are various arguments even inside their governments, so the authority and facts are easily missing under extreme circumstances.
“Sometimes even the media are not clear what the truth is, let alone the public,” He said. “Some media have produced and spread rumors when they lack sources, therefore many people felt the Western media have big problems.”
He said that the Western media were never apotheosized in journalism. “The Western media used to seem powerful, because they held the discourse, which basically reflects the power of a country.”
“For instance, the US has the strongest power, so facing some significant events, the coverage by US media was more influential and many people around the world would believe in US media,” he said.
“Nowadays the internet has been popularized in China, as has English… Chinese people could now feel the bias in Western media’s reports,” Lü said.
Lü noted that some Western media have a wicked intention to slander China in order to let China pay for the loss in the pandemic. “But such voices are gradually weakened, because, after all, the consensus of scientists still remains around the world.”