There is a lot of double-standards coverage on Hong Kong from the U.S. media, according to an article published recently by a Swiss daily newspaper.
Western media companies which have no reporters in Hong Kong tend to use “half-truth,” for example, video excerpts of a few seconds that are cut out or edited, as the basis for their reports, said Matthias Muller, the article’s author, who reports from Beijing for the Swiss paper Neue Zurcher Zeitung (NZZ).
The writer noted that a recent study by U.S. media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) compared the reporting and the word-choosing of the New York Times and the CNN on the protests in Chile, Ecuador, Haiti, and China’s Hong Kong.
The FAIR got an unsurprising conclusion that the two U.S. media outlets have reported on Hong Kong much more intensively than on protests in Latin American countries, although there were significantly more arrests, injuries and deaths in those places during recent weeks.
That is “an indication of how distorted their reporting was,” the paper said.
“The question remains why the two American media outlets (NYT and CNN) continue to glorify the ‘pro-democratic demonstrators’ despite the evidence of excessive violence,” the paper wrote, adding that the two news outlets otherwise tagged the violent demonstrators in Chile and Ecuador as “rioters,” “arsonists” or “pillagers.”
Thus the NYT and CNN are doing a disservice to themselves and other Western media with their one-sided reporting. It should be their job to report on events objectively and critically based on facts, the paper said.
Rioters set barricades with debris on streets to block traffic on Jan. 1, 2020 in Hong Kong, China. (Xinhua)
