[bjourne]

Same thing is happening in Gaza where over 200 civilians have been killed in the March of Return demonstrations over the last year. Our Western media reporting is insanely narrow and single-minded. One can only hope that, since we are outraged about the HK situation (as we should be!), it follows that we should be outraged about other worse situations too.

[kuzimoto]

The important thing to note here about the March of Return "demonstrations" is that is was not entirely peaceful.

From Wikipedia:

> Senior Hamas official Mahmoud Al-Zahhar, admitted in an interview to Al Jazeera "when we talk about 'peaceful resistance', we are deceiving the public. This is a peaceful resistance bolstered by a military force and by security agencies, and enjoying tremendous popular support."

So you basically had a bunch of militants using civilians as cover. They were throwing Molotov cocktails and using kites with incindiary devices.

[yellowapple]

This is consistent with the typical strategy of "setup missile launchers in hospitals and schools so that when Israel fires back they look like the bad guys for blowing up hospitals and schools", literally using civilians as human shields.

To compare this with the Hong Kong protests is absurd and intellectually dishonest.

[euix]

In eastern political systems such as China and Russia, the prevailing sentiment among the masses is cynicism. In democratic systems it is hypocrisy. Pick your poison.

[mikorym]

The one where you have the means of living together with self-determination.

[rjf72]

Would self determination not be reflected by approval of one's government? Presumably one is going to have a sense of greater self determination and government satisfaction if they feel that their government is pursuing their interests, and vice versa otherwise.

Harvard carried out a study involving a survey polling people across 30 different nations on a variety of different topics. [1] This includes (among various other more detailed categories) peoples' awareness of various world leaders, their self determined attention rate to news involving various leaders, and their general rating of those leaders. It reveals quite a lot of really interesting and surprising results. For instance about 88% of Americans do not know who Modi is, 85% of Saudis do not know who Putin is, but coming out on top is Israel which sports a less than 5% awareness of Modi. A number of the results really reveal how much of a bubble we all live in.

But the reason it's relevant is because it gives some third party measurement of how people within various countries view their country's leaders. As with all big data like this, people can prove anything they want - so I'm going to avoid giving any more specific numbers other than the neutral ones from above. Okay one more fun one, Tanzania just friggin loves everybody!

[1] - https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/reflections-survey-...

[Kalium]

How do you define and measure self-determination? What level of aggregation does it apply at?

[vkou]

Never happened, never will happen. You have thousands of gallons of e-ink spilled over police brutality in HK, a few drops on Iraq, and humm-hawws and 'well, they are all terrorists anyways' on Gaza.

Otherwise intelligent people are incapable of understanding that their outrage is being directed to serve geo-political ends. Antagonising China is patriotic. Antagonising Israel serves no end, and is, also of course, anti-Semitic.

The truly ironic bit is when presented with the idea that many mainlanders may be more supportive of their government than of HK, they dismiss it as brainwashing, compelled speech, or just flat out propaganda. As if we arrive to the contradictory conclusions we hold independently, and from first principles, without any steering...

[yorwba]

> Otherwise intelligent people are incapable of understanding that their outrage is being directed to serve geo-political ends.

"Direction" implies that there was a coordinated decision to inflate the importance of the Hong Kong protests by sending more journalists there to produce more articles. But Hong Kong was already an internationally important city with many journalists. Of course they were going to report on protests happening right under their nose.

For example, when the German broadsheet Die Zeit published an article on the protests, it was by the same journalist as always when there's something to report in Hong Kong. When they sent a team into Yemen, they weren't allowed into the country, operated from Djibouti and used a Yemeni reporter as a proxy to allow them to do interviews via video call; of course using a translator because there wasn't enough forewarning to learn a language for this assignment.

The difference in reporting difficulty explains the difference in reporting frequency.

If the media really wanted to patriotically antagonize China, they could have devoted similar attention to incidents in places like Nanjing, Zhuhai or Wuhan, but I only saw Wuhan make it into English-language media; that played out as usual when something happens where no (English-speaking) journalist is there to report on it.

[vkou]

>"Direction" implies that there was a coordinated decision to inflate the importance of the Hong Kong protests by sending more journalists there to produce more articles. But Hong Kong was already an internationally important city with many journalists. Of course they were going to report on protests happening right under their nose.

You don't need to send more journalists to a place to have more coverage of it.

You need to promote the articles journalists write to front-page headlines. You need to have talking heads who have never left the telestudio talk about the issue.

Sure, you have to deal with the constraints imposed on you by local authorities. Israel for some odd reason isn't super-keen on letting journalists into the Gaza strip, either. But that, itself, is part of the story.

There's a trade war going on, and China has never been in the Western sphere, and antagonizing it is popular and easy, and currently very patriotic, because they are also stealing all our jobs.

Antagonizing Israel is not patriotic, and it's a 'Western' nation, and it's not stealing our jobs, and also you will be in the company of a bunch of truly despicable anti-semites, and the people repressed there are definitely 'non-Western'.

The media cultivates this particular branch of selective empathy, in a way that just happens to coincide with geo-political leanings of our governments. And we eat it up, wholesale, without even a shred of self-awareness.