[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.