It faced tough competition, but the NYT has won the Walter Duranty Award again
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Astute readers will recall the name of the New York Times reporter that helped Joseph Stalin cover up the Holodomor — Moscow’s genocidal campaign in Ukraine that killed millions through starvation. Or perhaps better put these days, Moscow’s first genocidal campaign in Ukraine.
Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for his lies and propaganda in service to mass murder. One has to wonder whether the committee will give a similar award to this gem dug up by Philip Melancthon
…. As bad as that cheerleading headline has proven to be, the report itself is even worse. It’s still up at the NY Times too, which is either a testament to transparency or cluelessness … or both. For instance, this passage looks especially Duranty-esque:
The Chinese Communist Party reached deep into private business and the broader population to drive a recovery, an authoritarian approach that has emboldened its top leader, Xi Jinping. …
In the year since the coronavirus began its march around the world, China has done what many other countries would not or could not do. With equal measures of coercion and persuasion, it has mobilized its vast Communist Party apparatus to reach deep into the private sector and the broader population, in what the country’s leader, Xi Jinping, has called a “people’s war” against the pandemic — and won.
China is now reaping long-lasting benefits that few expected when the virus first emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan and the leadership seemed as rattled as at any moment since the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989.
The success has positioned China well, economically and diplomatically, to push back against the United States and others worried about its seemingly inexorable rise. It has also emboldened Mr. Xi, who has offered China’s experience as a model for others to follow.
Morrissey:
One has to read all the way through this to get a feel for just how much of an embarrassment this piece has become. It hails the Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines, which have turned out to be ineffective; it shrugged off the supply chain crisis which was already emerging as the story was published; and claimed that the CCP was orienting itself to serve its subjects’ “material interests” as a benefit of their mobilization, despite widespread reports of food and medicine shortages.
All of this propaganda was in service to a clear message, too: promoting authoritarianism. How else to read this?
Beijing’s successes in each dimension of the pandemic — medical, diplomatic and economic — have reinforced its conviction that an authoritarian capacity to quickly mobilize people and resources gave China a decisive edge that other major powers like the United States lacked. It is an approach that emphasizes a relentless drive for results and relies on an acquiescent public.
Addendum: World Economic Forum chair Klaus Schwab certainly qualifies as a finalist, as Jonathan Turley points out:
China has expanded its crackdown on protesters over the government’s authoritarian measures to control Covid, including arresting and beating a BBC reporter. The crackdown follows comments last week from World Economic Forum (WEF) founder Chair Klaus Schwab declared China to be a “role model” in how to handle the virus.
Last week, Schwab told a Chinese media outlet in Bangkok, Thailand, that “the Chinese model is certainly a very attractive model for quite a number of countries.”
What Schwab calls “an attractive model” includes the denial of free speech and associational rights as well as brutal confinement conditions for millions. That approach also included the failure to promptly notify the world of the outbreak and the refusal to share information on the origins of Covid 19.
